106 American Literature
Work will be irrelevant. But because I am concerned with the way historians of colonial America and their counterparts in literature departments have lost touch with each other, it is important to reiterate that, particularly among historian, many of Miller’s assumptions (and, among our contemporaries, those of Sacvan Bercovitch, who remainds a Millerite despite his different politics) about seventeenth-century New England have been strongly challenged. Most recently, for example, Dwight Bozeman’s To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (1988) forces diehard Millerites to confront the blasphemy that the master himself wore very limited ideological blinders and thus provided at best a partial portrait of the New England mind. Bozeman offers strong evidence, for example, that Miller’s famous notion of New England’s errand into the wilderness was little more than a felicitous trope (particularly for post-World War II Americans), derived from atypical evidence, rather than a keystone of the Puritan experiment. Moreover, in his rich book Bozeman suggests (contra Bercovitch, Alan Heimert, and others) that “millennial hope was a far more modest factor in early American Puritan theology than usually assumed and, second, that Puritan millennialism in its formative phases generated hope for the future primarily by refocusing retrospective priorities” (p. 194). Bozeman contends that a close reading of all the relevant sources proves that “it is impossible to credit the thesis that progressive aims fundamentally shaped the American jeremiad” (p. 339). Simply put, “in its most essential features, the American jeremiad resists modernizing interpretation” (p. 342).
But, as with the emperor’s new clothes, no one is willing to say what he sees, that the origins of the nineteenth-century American self obviously are far more complex than we hitherto
Also see Bozeman’s “The Puritans’ ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly, 59 (1986), 231-51; and Donald Weber, “Rehistoricizing the Errand,” American Literary History, 2 (1990), 101-18.
The relevant texts here are Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966); Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millenium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); and Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).