sly formulated, in the course of
centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and
historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable
than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and
endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated
or even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the
genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler.

Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating
hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger
Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics
of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American"
qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay?
And what an American settler Cromwell would have made!

If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of theological
and political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the
writings of the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which
seem to presage the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor
John Robinson's farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620
contained the famous words: "The Lord has more truth yet to break forth
out of His holy Word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the
reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion.... Luther and
Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated
not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver
Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is identified, none
the less, with the spirit of American liberalism in religion.

In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of
independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a
letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and
feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be traced back for two
hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first
plantations in America." "I have always laughed," he declared in
an earlier letter, "at the affectation of representing American
independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late
invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay
as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should
assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to
Americans from the first settlement of the count