Introduction

The selections in this volume illustrate main aspects of Amer-

ican intellectual and imaginative origins and growth through the

third quarter of the eighteenth century. Exhibiting not so much

colonial social, institutional, and political forms, as ideas and

attitudes which made for such forms, they embody the thought

and imagination of those Colonial Americans who were to be-

come Revolutionary Americans. These writings, in fact, point

immediately toward the American mind of the Revolutionary

period a mind of the Enlightenment, one which was to center

on the notion of the free, rational personality and which was to

know that freedom and rationality were embodied in the very

nature of things American.

There are represented in this volume some of the origins of

that mind and of its drive toward freedom. The Pilgrim idea of

freedom through private and separate devotion, the Puritan

idea of freedom through work and facing one s fate as a sinful

individual, the Virginia idea of freedom through the responsi-

bilities of the ruling gentleman, the Quaker idea of freedom

through the inviolable sacredness of the individual, and the

frontier idea of freedom through violent self-assertion--all these

ultimately found their largest realization in the thoughts, beliefs,

and actions of enlightened Americans of the Revolution and

beyond. In the writings here selected, we can know these ideas

as flley came into being and began to be explored and tested

and as they made for characteristic attitudes toward life and

living.

There is perhaps not enough of what we may, properly

speaking, call "literature" in this collection, as there was little

of the sustained esthetic attitude in colonial America. Colonial

Americans were determined to make a new way of life in a new