The ministers and magistrates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and all the women who wrote history through the Civil War, wrote a form of providential history. They wanted to justify the ways of God to man and vice versa. A well known work in this tradition was William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. He wrote this book in the 1630s and 1640s when he was the governor of the colony. Of Plymouth Plantation recounts the fate of a tiny band of Pilgrims who fled England for Holland and then for the New World. Also writing this type of history was Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts and Cotton Mather. Mary Rowlandson's experience with her own captivity contained the same providential theme.
In the eighteenth century, as the European Enlightenment came to America, history took on a secular and naturalistic cast. A new class of intellectuals had come to see history as subject to natural law. These rationalist historians flourished alongside and sometimes superseded the clerics who had once dominated the educated class in the colonies. They told a new story of progress and reason in human affairs. Most of these historians were lawyer-politicians, planter-aristocrats, merchants, or professionals. Among the most provident were Thomas Hutchinson, leading merchant and royal governor of Massachusetts; William Smith, physician, landowner, and lieutenant governor of New York; and Robert Beverly and William Byrd of Virginia, both planter-aristocrats and office-holders. Their writing was more refined and allusive than the studiously plain prose of their Puritan predecessors. They wrote history for their own satisfaction and to explain to the enlightened world the success of men like themselves: free, bold, intelligent, and ambitious.
Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia is a highly evolved product of this rationalist tradition. America is for Jefferson, as it was for the Puritans, a model for the world, but natural law takes the place of divine providence in directing its affairs.
