A History of the American People

It is, however, a futile quest to look for much in the way of fine art produced in 17th-century
America. Only about thirty paintings have survived from this period, all of them amateurish. We
know the names of men described as painters but it is impossible to match them convincingly to
the surviving paintings. Any who practiced as painters did so intermittently, it seems. One or
two Dutchmen in New York Gerrit Duyckinck (1660-1712) for instance-combined portrait
painting with other crafts, such as glazing. There were virtually no architects in the first decades.
Men, even men with many acres, designed their own houses: the tradition of the rich amateur
architect began early in America. Thus there is Adam Thoroughgood's house in Norfolk,
Virginia, 1636-40, of brick, in a mixture of Elizabethan and Jacobean styles, with a huge,
medieval-type chimney. Another early Virginia house, built by Arthur Allen and known as
Bacon's Castle, had towers, front and rear, massive chimney-stacks, and Flemish gables. All the
writers were amateurs too, be they authors of works of travel, like John Smith or William
Bradford, or Puritan poets like the metaphysician Edward Taylor of Westfield, Massachusetts
(c.1644-1729) or Michael Wigglesworth, whose theological poem, Day of Doom, published in
Cambridge in 1662, popularized Puritan dogma in ballad meter.
Yet there was one sense in which early America was abreast of the European world, even
ahead of it. It had a deep-rooted, and increasingly experimental, political culture. Here the
English tradition was of incomparable value. It was rich and very ancient. By comparison, the
French and Spanish settlers knew little of the art of politics. Both France and Spain, as
geographical entities with national institutions, were still recent developments in the 17th
century, and neither had much experience of representative government, or even at that date of
unified legal systems. By contrast, England had been a national unity since the 9th century, with
forms of representation going back to that date and even beyond. Its common law began to
mature as early as the 12th century; its first statute of the realm, Magna Carta, was enrolled as
early as 1215; its parliaments, with their knights of the shire and their burgesses of the towns,
had had a continuous history since the 14th century, as an institution which passed laws for all
the people and raised revenues from all of them too. Behind the Englishmen who came to settle
in Virginia and Massachusetts, in Carolina and Maryland and Pennsylvania, were 1,000 years of
political history.
Moreover, it must be said that the period at which this tradition was implanted in America was
also of great significance. English America `took off' as a viable social and economic entity in
the three decades 1630-60. That was when its population reached a critical mass large enough to
produce self-sustaining growth. And it was during these three decades that there took place in
England a veritable explosion of political argument and experiment, in which, perhaps for the
first time in history, the fundamentals of participatory and democratic politics were discussed. It
could be said, indeed, that modern politics was invented in the England of the 1640s, and the
English settlers in America were, in a sense, participants in this process-the coming and going
between England and America during this decade was of great political significance. If the
English had first settled America in the first half of the 16th century, during the Tudor autocracy,
or in the first half of the 18th century, during the long calm of the Whig supremacy, it might
have been a very different story. But they settled it during the first half of the 17th century, when
the smoldering dispute between king and parliament reached its climax, burst into flames, and
was resolved by a parliamentary victory, albeit a qualified one. The English settling in America
brought with them this political tradition, just when it was at its most active and fruitful.
The early settlers, then, came from an intensely religious and political background, and most
of them were independent-minded, with ingrained habits of thinking things out for themselves.