The Tree Became A Goat - People in the Wilderness

New England was opposed to old. It singled out strands of  religion. New England left class, status, court, stage, literature. Severity and plainness were closer to the medieval. Two hundred years after  founding it worried its literature didn't compete. Step child English affiliates still worry. The spiritual did not renew the physical but contaminated it.

Uncontaminated nature means uncontaminated by mind not land fills.  The Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest to drive it out  on the back of some goat, except the goat was a tree.  The sin bearer was the forest. It had to be mowed lest sins find their way back. A scapegoat is no good unless lost.  Trees also hid predators. The tree became the goat and was cut. Then the forest could not hide the terror of the dark.  This thinking fueled all American botanical and biological extinction.

Puritans thought "the world," physical nature, would contaminate. This was  toxic in the austere soil of New England. Garrisoned  against the natural New England only welcomed the Pennsylvania genius of inviting nature indoors two centuries late.  By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing  for the pond. Early New England believed that savage men, wild men and their own sins lurked at the clearing's edge, only kept at bay by cutting back the growth. Defoliation the  forest, clear cut and exterminate prevented sin and made a profit. Against the evil in themselves they built a theology of dominion for their superior race. It is a new puritan age of greed today, a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead... an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

Raze and Exterminate lay down like Romulus and Remus at the Puritan door of the New English. Question these sucklings with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who  survived their murderous adversaries in Holland and Switzerland, domesticated the natural, invited it indoors, befriended it in their own natures, painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t make any Scarlet Letter, it decorated chests and barns.

Do not say the puritan hid. He celebrated  his malaise. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp governmental/pastoral views. Their depravity offended Hawthorne who called a "virgin soil as a cemetery" (The Scarlet Letter, I ), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children."  "To the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror"“ (Broyles), or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the gentler Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of those first  centuries.

Divide and conquer is the English rule, Quakers aside. They had more in common with the pacifist Pennsylvania sects than those who came to rule Pennsylvania. Basic English exploited differences among the  Germans that Penn's colony had been founded to set free. But relations with the "world" were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily too. They divided into Church and Sect, churched vs. plain. The separate but unequal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization tended to end after the Civil War when the Dutch gave up and began to assimilate. Some people think the Amish are the last bastion of the "separate" and that these differences existed up till 1950 in speaking German, farming, going barefoot. The Amish may continue to exist in 2050, but assimilation got the rest.

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