The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820 Paperback – March 25, 1997

I found the first five chapters of this book to be insightful, and extremely helpful in the art of parsing and exegeting public documents. I found the last chapter a disappointment. It was on a legitimate topic, enough for a whole other book, on how women, blacks and Native Americans were left out of the Constitution and other early public documents of the USA, but this chapter did not proceed by the exegetical method of the others. I found the whole intrusion of the topic of 'rage' as irrelevant and a digression. Perhaps I say this as a whitle male.I wish the book had been given a subtitle such as "from a literary historical point of view." "The American Enlightenment" certainly is not a chronological history the enlight. in the US, nor does it concentrate on how the European philosophes, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau et al. influenced varied American thinkers. Rather, by closing analyzing the contents and composition of texts such as the Declaration, the Constitution, Common Sense, and the Federalist, Ferguson gives the reader a more profound appreciation of the literary craftsmanship of the Founders, and how they took such care to use the juste mot.Ferguson concurs with John Adams that the Revolution had been won in the hearts and minds of the people, at least going back to 1764, when residents of the colonies were calling themselves Americans, not British. On p. 42, Ferguson notes that Enlightenment had taken much of its concepts from Christianity, and then gave them secular names. In fact, Peter Oliver, Lieutenant-Governor of MA as the Revolution started it, blamed the conflict on political ministers,the 'black regiment of rebellion." But ironically, after midwiving the Revolution, ministers were dethroned from being the highest intellectual culture formers, by the lawyer-politicians who became the nation's first legislators.I was suprised that Ferguson, on p. 69, cited the 'doctrine' of the separation of church and state as if its existence is a non-controversial fact at the time of the nation's founding. Of course, as first enuntiated in Jefferson's private letter of 1803, it has blossomed in its effect on the relationship, but what it has become is not what is written in the Constitution. Ferguson deftly illustrates how much of what is in the final Constitution can be found in the new state Constitutions and the Articles of Confederation.I disagree with Ferguson's overly optimistic claim on p. 150 that "the Federal Constitution of 1787 embodies the central aspirations of the Enlightenment." The Central teaching of at least the European Enlightenment is the overthrowing of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The central action-aspiration is the proverbial 'strangling of the last king with entrails of the last priest' or vice versa.In a similar way, Ferguson says that John Marshall "establishes" judicial review, but one so cognizant of various levels of rhetoric, if he were not biased would say that Marshall 'declared' it; it only became established when everybody went along.All in all, this book deepens and enlarges one's knowledge of the period and the documents.I was surprised a book like this had no footnotes.

If you are looking for a readable and easy to understand overview of Enlightenment thought in the US, this is a good place to start. Although you may quibble with some of the analysis, Ferguson does a good job presenting the different threads of Enlightenment thought in America, with special emphasis on how it impacted the thoughts and writings of the Founding Fathers.