Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730–1805. Группа авторов

for in their own way they signal the reader clearly enough as to the author’s meaning and intent.

      The reader may also note that some authors interpolate their own words into quotations without closing and reopening quotation marks. Since it was obvious enough that this was the case, we refrained from adding the marks. Wherever quotation marks or other punctuation marks did need insertion by us, we bracketed them.

      BIBLICAL QUOTES AND CITATIONS

      Naturally, the sermons are replete with references to scripture. On occasion, editorial considerations led us to check on the wording of a quotation (and some few mistakes thereby detected were silently corrected, particularly in citations of chapter or verse numbers). However, no systematic checking of biblical material was done, and for all practical purposes the quotations and citations can be considered to be reproduced as they originally appeared, correct or incorrect.

      OTHER MATTERS

      All footnotes are the work of the sermon authors and have been edited along the same guidelines as for the sermon proper. Footnote symbols were changed as necessary to key the notes to the sermon as the material received a new paging arrangement in this edition.

      Many other elements in the originals, ornamental, typographic, or idiosyncratic, have been dispensed with. Most often this involved modernizing odd arrangements of text and/or blank space.

      The original pamphlets in which the sermons appeared also included announcements, legislative resolutions concerning publication, dedications, prefaces, opening prayers, and appendices that have been deleted from this volume, except where they could not be considered extraneous to the sermon’s message and significance.

      Not all the sermons were assigned titles by their authors, as a look at the title-page facsimiles included with each sermon will reveal. In such cases, we extracted from the pamphlet copy what we deemed appropriate as a stand-in title.

      The facsimiles, while they add a visual element to this collection, also serve as testaments to the erudition and civility of the age that produced these works. They shed light on the sermons in the information and in the epigraphs they provide, the latter being an embellishing convention from the days of the Renaissance.

      The facsimiles often provide two dates: the date of the sermon’s delivery and that of its publication, and in many cases, these dates are not far apart. But some of the items, as previously stated, were never orally delivered though they are sermonic in tradition. The publication date was the most consistent key to the placement of the works in a time frame, therefore. We opted, then, to order the sermons according to the date of their dissemination in print. The reader may note that this results in our placing no. 20 at 1778, though apparently it was preached in 1775; moreover, no. 43 was preached in 1789, but we reprint the second edition from 1794, in which the author, David Osgood, updated his text, and which prompted a number of responses then and in 1795. Finally, no. 37 is placed with a conjectural publication date at 1791, when it was preached. Yet it may not have appeared in print until eleven years later, as indicated on the facsimile page included with it.

Bibliographic Note

      No systematic bibliographic essay can be undertaken here, but some brief comments on the sources may be helpful to the reader.

      A bibliography of generally relevant writings is included in Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion and the American Founding (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), a study that is in many respects a companion to the present volume. Extensive bibliographic information on the religious writings of the period and on pertinent secondary works can be gleaned from the notes to Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986); and to Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York, 1988), a work attentive to the politics–religion issues.

      The Great Awakening in America, its significance and aftermath, is best presented by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); and by Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis, 1967); valuable also is William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston, 1967) and the same author’s “The Great Awakening as the Key to the Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and William G. McLoughlin, Preachers & Politicians: Two Essays on the Origins of the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass., 1977). Important also is Weber, Rhetoric and History, Chap. 1 and passim. Still fundamental is Herbert Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (New York, 1924) (see the third volume, especially at pp. 407–90); and Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York, 1962); and the same author’s The Spirit of ’76 (New York, 1976). Also, from the abundant literature on Jonathan Edwards, Sr., who was pivotal in the Awakening, may be mentioned Alan Heimert’s book cited above, and Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1981); also Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout, eds., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York, 1988).

      The key bibliographic works for early American history utilized in making this collection include the following standard works: Joseph Sabin, Wilberforce Eames, and R.W.G. Vail, Bibliotheca Americana. A Dictionary of Books relating to America from its Discovery to the Present Time, 29 vols. (New York, 1868–1936); Charles Evans and Clifford K. Shipton, American Bibliography. A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 down to and including the year 1820. With bibliographical and biographical notes, 14 vols. (Chicago, New York, and Worcester, Mass., 1903–1959); Richard P. Bristol, Supplement to Charles Evans’ American Bibliography, 2 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1970). The some 50,000 items listed in the Evans and Shipton and Bristol works are revised and corrected in Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, National Index of American Imprints through 1800; the Short-title Evans, 2 vols. (Worcester, Mass., 1969). In turn, this work serves as the index for the vast Readex microprint edition: Clifford K. Shipton, ed., Early American Imprints, 1639–1800 (Worcester, Mass. and New York, 1955–1983), which provides copies of all extant American publications (except newspapers and broadsides) of between 1639 and 1800.

      The principal sources for the biographical notes preceding each sermon are reference books which are not cited unless directly quoted. Since most of the authors included in the volume were clergymen of New England or the Middle Atlantic region and—with the notable exception of many Awakening evangelists such as the Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland—graduates of one of the early colleges, the following reference works were relied upon especially: Frederick Lewis Weis, New England Clergy and the Colonial Churches of New England (Lancaster, Mass., 1936); the same author’s Colonial Churches and the Colonial Clergy of the Middle and Southern Colonies, 1607–1776 (Lancaster, Mass., 1938); John L. Sibley and Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17 vols. (Boston, 1873–1975); Franklin B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 6 vols. (New York, 1885–1912); William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York, 1857–1869); James McLachlan and Richard A. Harrison, Princetonians: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J., 1976–1981).

      Of considerable help also were James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes, eds., American Writers Before 1800, 3 vols. (Westport, Ct., 1983); A.W. Plumstead, ed., The Wall and the Garden: Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons, 1670–1775 (Minneapolis, 1968); Thomas R. Adams, American Independence: The Growth of an Idea, 2d ed. (Austin and New Haven, 1980); the same author’s The American Controversy, 2 vols. (Providence and New York, 1980); Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 vols. (Chicago, 1969); Allen Johnson, Dumas Malone, et al., eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 22 vols. (New York, 1928–1958); Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (Oxford, 1917–1950); and Frederick Barton, ed., Pulpit Power and Eloquence: Or, 100 Best Sermons of the Nineteenth