The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell

Horace Bushnell, the much maligned 19th-century liberal pastor/scholar/ theologian, is here vindicated as a deeply conservative Puritan and misunderstood intellectual of his time. In this biography, Mullin considers Bushnell in the context of his time and milieu. While calling him a "flinty character," Mullin argues that Bushnell was quintessentially a Yankee and a Puritan, seeking innovation yet all the while sustained by a bedrock trust in the values and continuity of the Puritan tradition. Mullin places great emphasis on Bushnell's European travels as well as his writings from 1846 to early 1849, where he finds him working through his concerns for the lost unity of the Puritans. These ideas fed into Bushnell's sense that "the fractiousness of American political life was an outgrowth of the New Light piety," an evangelical piety that stressed individualism over community.