social and moral matrix of the village
Jefiersonians and Federalists agreed on the virtues of freehold, fee-simple tenure. The Lockean idea of possession legitimated by improvement sits comfortably in Dwight’s mind beside another specifically religious justification – a divine covenant. Either rationale was adequate to eradicate symbolically Native Americans8 and to heroize the labor of pioneers whose ‘steady habits’ (a cardinal virtue for Dwight) would improve the land. When he encounters pockets of feudalism (as in the patroonship holdings of the Dutch Hudson Valley) he finds things “at a stand” and lacking in “sprightliness.”
Notwithstanding his approval of freehold, Dwight was suspicious of the isolated farmsteads fee-simple tenure increasingly entailed, and was aware of the centrifugal tendencies in New England settlement history. He expresses grave misgivings about wandering, isolated and unchurched people. They include itinerant preachers who clearly threatened ecclesiastical religion. But the likes of wandering tin-ware peddlers seeking petty gain without “order, control, or worship” (II, p. 34) are also described with particular contempt. With regard to settled farmers, he notes the social and psychological effects of isolation (inhibiting all kinds of interaction and most specifically church attendance). A family is forced to have recourse to its own circle. Children are “abashed” by the sight of strangers, leading to “rustic sheepishness” and “rough and forbidding deportment” (I, pp. 244-245). Again, “the inhabitants … of … scattered plantations … suffer the usual inconveniences, both moral and physical, of such settlements” (IV, p. 2). Dwight consistently writes the progress of brush clearing, fencing, and farming as a process of beaut ificat ion leading to social integration. With the farmer’s daily and annual increment of labor “his fields increase in number and beauty,” his “neighbors multiply” and “better manners” prevail (II, pp. 327-329).
The virtue of individual effort has imperceptibly shifted to a world of refined neighboring. This is a crucial transition, which goes to the heart of Dwight’s use of the aesthetic. On close examination his texts contain very few accounts of the beauties of individual farms, or of rich herds and fruitful fields ascribed to the credit of an individual farmer. This is what Bushman (1993, p. 378) describes as a very sharp boundary in late eighteenth-century thought – between the uncouth, unsocialized world of the isolated farmer, and the social and moral matrix of the village community. Dwight often marks off this boundary with aesthetic language.
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