Megan Roeling Coplen and Dr. Brandie Siegfried, English
Traditionally, scholars have labeled the American Revolution as a “creation,” but this project seeks to examine it as an extension and eventual reinvention of an English national identity established a century before the war. My goal was to find what influence the writers of the English Civil War had upon the leaders of the American Revolution, showing the extent to which the American colonists borrowed ideology from their English forbearers.
Many works have been written on the comparison between English political theory and the ideology of the American Revolution, yet most historians focus on the great writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; little attention has been given to the writings done in the first half of the seventeenth century. I hoped to unveil how these works composed prior to and during the English Civil War (1642-1651) influenced the rhetoric of the American Revolutionary Era (1760-1783).
The philosophy of several English writers such as Algernon Sidney and Thomas Hobbes became important during America’s resistance against the British, but I chose to focus my project on John Milton. Milton, though best known as a poet, was also a political philosopher whose prose wielded influence during the English Civil War. His political works, most notably Eikonoklastes and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, paralleled the philosophy of many colonial writers.
Initially, I planned to focus on the influence of Milton in the writing of Thomas Paine. However, while reading Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in preparation for my research trip, I came across references to a transatlantic correspondence between Thomas Hollis, an English author, and Jonathan Mayhew, a prominent Boston minister. The two men wrote to each other from 1759 until Mayhew’s death in 1766. Bailyn characterized Hollis as a champion of liberty and promoter of English political literature; I wondered if Hollis ever advocated Milton in his writings to America, and Hollis became my new focus. The Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston has the personal letters written between Hollis and Mayhew, and I traveled there to search for references to Milton in these original writings.
After reading through his letters it is clear that Thomas Hollis supported the rights of the American colonists, and during the decades prior to the actual war he consistently encouraged Mayhew and others to study Milton. He sent many copies of Milton’s political tracts to Harvard University, as Edward Holyoke, the university’s president wrote to Hollis: “We have just now received from your bountiful hand a most beautiful as well as valuable present of Milton’s prose-works.” Further, Thomas Hollis declared Milton as his hero, and outlined the famous writer’s principles for Mayhew. “If I understand Milton’s principles they are these,” wrote Hollis, “that government, at least our government, is by compact. That a king becoming a tyrant, and the compact, thereby broken, the power reverts again to the Constitution, the People, who may punish such Tyrant as they see fit, and constitute such a new form of government as shall then appear to them to be most expedient.” Such political principles would soon dictate the colonists’ own beliefs and provide a basis for their revolution.
Hollis also revealed the direct influence of Milton upon one of the first American pamphlets to defend colonial rights against British legislative tyranny: James Otis’s The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Hollis wrote to Mayhew, “All the great and generous Principles of government, that is of public good, which ever warmed Milton, Locke, or any patriot head, are familiar to [Otis], and applied to his own particular argument in a way they . . . would have honored and approved.” Beginning with Otis, Milton’s ideas molded the rhetoric of later colonial authors, as they used Milton’s experience with the English Civil War to persuade others to join them in what would become the “Second English Civil War.”
Currently, I am in the process of amplifying my research in order to produce a conference-length paper. I am searching for references to Milton in writings beyond Otis, and I am beginning to trace the impact other English authors had upon colonial pamphlets. I hope to present at the University of Maryland Graduate Conference in the fall as well as at other regional conferences in New England. The longer term objective is to amplify the said conference paper into a publishable work, the potential target journals being The American Historical Review, The William and Mary Quarterly, and the Journal of Renaissance Studies. Also, to complete my work I plan to travel to the British Library in London to examine documents in the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts, which houses several works by Milton.
The various aspects of this project from the research experience, have helped prepare me to become a professional historian as I begin my first year of graduate school in the fall. The skills gained during this project will be invaluable as I pursue a doctorate degree in American history, with an emphasis on the Revolutionary Era.
References
- Edward Holyoke to Thomas Hollis, 18 December 1759, Manuscript Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. All letters are from this manuscript collection and will hereafter be cited as MHS.
- Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 27 August, 1760, MHS.
- Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 4 March 1765, MHS. Besides Milton, Hollis also appeared fond of the writings of Algernon Sidney, a contemporary of Milton whom I plan on researching next.
- I would like to thank the helpful librarians and staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society for their assistance. And of course, many thanks to ORCA for funding this project and supporting my research trip. Further, this project would not have been possible without the advice of my mentor, Dr. Siegfried. She has constantly challenged me to improve both my research and writing, and for that I am truly grateful.