(Of course, John Brown was a major Puritan himself, having read Jonathan
Edwards for inspiration about the need to go to war against slavery.)
During the exact same decades that Mencken was using the Puritans as a
signifier for everything stodgy, superstitious, and anti-intellectual
about American culture, a Harvard University historian named Perry
Miller was undermining precisely that stereotypical view, positing the
Puritans as radical and innovative thinkers. In more than a dozen books,
such as The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939) and Errand
into the Wilderness (1956), Miller rescued the Puritans from their
reputation for producing stern judgment and not much else. His view was
that the Puritans, arguably the most highly educated generation of
Americans, had molded qualities of thought that secularized into later
movements from Transcendentalism to Pragmatism. The Puritans were, in
Miller’s estimation, a veritable intellectual vanguard, prefiguring the
richness of the national imagination. They “went into the eighteenth
century well prepared in the terms of its own tradition to keep pace
with the intellectual and emotional alterations of a new era.”
Continuing in The New England Mind, Miller argues that, in their
reasoning and rhetoric, the Puritans were suited to “both the emergence
of an Age of Reason and the newer religious mood that was to arise in
the reaction against reason.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-puritans-are-alright/
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