In the mid-1700s the Anglo-French struggle for empire stimulated the attention continental Europeans gave to North America; an attention so far aroused mainly by tales of a strange land, imported American plants and animals, and an interest in the exotic Indians. Still, the attention remained altogether moderate and even the momentous events of the American Revolution enhanced it only temporarily. Although the ideas of the philosophes influenced some educated colonials, the aims, ideals, and realities of the American Revolution had an English context, one foreign to continental Europeans. Even that prophet of progress, Condorcet, granted a different status to the American Revolution. It was, he thought, a less wrenching experience because Americans had no need to rebel against an intolerant church, hereditary privileges, and a feudal structure. Once the links to England were severed, Americans could exist in liberty under English law. The American voices proclaiming their Revolution to be an event of a universal historical importance were heard in Europe only faintly. The long distance between the continents, European hostility to radical republicanism, and the American preoccupation with internal affairs facilitated the relative isolation of the United States from continental Europe. As a consequence the questions raised by the American Revolution—why it had happened and how it fit into the course of human development-were mainly debated by scholars and public officials in England and the United States.
As is usual after great upheavals, the heat of conflict could be felt in the early accounts of the American Revolution. It was intense in the histories of the Revolution written by a few Loyalist officials and judges from the safety of their exile in England or Scotland. Peter Oliver condemned the break in the continuity of English development and blamed a few unprincipled demagogues— “a disgrace to Christianity” he called them—for having used some English mistakes to stir up the masses. Thomas Hutchinson, the last civil governor of the Massachusetts Bay province, was more tactful and repaid all of the vilification directed against him with a surprisingly fair account. With a good understanding of American life and good craftsmanship he portrayed the American Revolution as an uprising prompted by errors in governance. Yet Hutchinson denied that these errors justified independence or that a trend toward liberty was at work in history, as Americans argued. The Revolution was the work of rabble-rousers who had heated up “the dregs of the people” who then aroused others, although originally the general populace had not been ready for independence. Hutchinson also sensed correctly that the actual inequities in the tax system were less important than the people’s perceptions of them and even the fears of future inequities to be inflicted. George Chalmers, a one-time lawyer in Maryland, blamed the Revolution on the British government’s basic error of granting too many privileges and giving too much power to provincial assemblies. Excessive benevolence led to the Revolution.
The Patriots had problems with their historiography. Considerable sums of money were needed to publish in the small and poorly organized book market, and for the author there was the lack of easy access to good sources. Much like the Loyalists, they relied heavily on Edmund Burke’s and James Dodsley’s Annual Register with its accurate reports on American events. American historians described the revolutionary events convinced that the Revolution had been a legitimate revolt of English colonials for ancient rights. Hence Patriotic historians—such as David Ramsay or Mercy Otis Warren—inverted the Loyalist interpretations. Where Loyalists had seen demagogues inciting unwilling Americans, Patriots saw a few men with vision awakening their fellow citizens; where Loyalists had found the grievances being mainly those of Massachusetts and of no concern to other colonies. Patriots saw tyranny beginning in Massachusetts and spreading subsequently to all other colonies; and where Loyalists saw conspiracy brewing since the 1760s, Patriots discerned a long-time and growing awareness among colonials of fundamental differences between them and the English of the mother country. With significant consequences for America’s future role and for historiography, John Adams and a few others soon perceived the Revolution as an event important for all of mankind because of the emergence of a strong new republic as a champion of liberty and a fighter against tyranny. Most Patriots would also have agreed with Benjamin Trumbull, who placed the American Revolution among the great human deeds done under God’s guidance. Mercy Otis Warren pronounced American independence the starting point for world republicanism. This dichotomy between the perceptions of the American Revolution as a fight for traditional English rights and as a struggle for natural, inalienable, and universal human rights would mark American historical consciousness for a long time.
In the year of the Constitution appeared two historical accounts of the American Revolution. The Reverend William Gordon had experienced the
Revolutionary War, gotten to know many of the American leaders, and returned only in 1786 to England. Although much of his account eschews partisanship, in the end he, like other Loyalists, spoke of trickery and deception on the part of the revolutionary leaders. David Ramsay wrote the first history of the American Revolution clearly sympathetic to its cause. When he celebrated the emergence of the nation that held promise to reshape human nature, he inspired his readers and subsequent historians, among them Jedidiah Morse and Noah Webster. Their works and many more to come portrayed the Revolutionary War as the central event in which the American nation was shaped. In that nation-forming process, history had a frankly didactic purpose, that of teaching the new Republic’s citizens that a republic of free citizens could only survive through the public and private virtue of these citizens—a lesson reminiscent of Leonardo Bruni and Montesquieu. Historians must help forestall failure—a United States of servile people subject to despots—by using the exhortative examples of great deeds and persons. John Adams, not a historian but concerned with history, put more trust in another buttress, the mixed constitution as celebrated by Polybius and Montesquieu.
Biographers preferred the Founding Fathers as the teachers of the new nation, and none seemed to fit that role better than George Washington. Parson Mason Locke Weems’ biography of Washington (1800) knew no subtlety in transforming Washington into the hero worthy of emulation by all the people. No matter how many frowns the work caused on the faces of later, more erudite historians, Weems succeeded in shaping minds and inspiring them. Washington the national hero, not Washington the Virginian, became the personification of those virtues which the young republic wished its citizens to have; thrift, patriotism, temperance, frugality, industry, honesty, and obedience; hence the stories of hatchets, the cherry tree, and cabbage beds. The shrewd bookseller Weems had harmonized the ideals of people and the needs of a young nation in the fictional image of Washington; Weems’s biography eventually became folklore. Others found a biography of Washington convenient for making comments on recent political battles. Shortly after 1800 John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote reverently but ponderously about Washington, whom he had known and whose family gave him access to records. Yet, he did little research, copied much of the material from other books, and buried Washington’s biography in general history. Marshall also tinged his discussion of general history, taxes, and individual rights with strong Federalist sympathies. His implications that the Republicans disturbed the constitutional system upset Thomas Jefferson who—without success—encouraged a number of people to write a Jeffersonian history of Washington’s life and times. He ended up praising two works. In John Wood’s History of the Administration of John Adams (1802), which Jefferson had partially sponsored, Washington appeared as a people-loving Jeffersonian and Adams as a monarchical president. Jefferson also praised Mercy Otis Warren for her history of the Revolution. Warren had lived through the
Revolution, was related to some of the revolutionary figures, and had been close to the struggle. She loved history, observed keenly, and wrote well. Her characterizations were astute and full of patriotic fervor. Thomas Hutchinson was a villain and George III obstinate, weak, and politically wrong rather than cruel, wicked, and tyrannical. In all of that she was not deterred by John Adams’s advice that “history is not the province of ladies,” an opinion induced at least partially by Warren’s strong Jeffersonian sympathies and her criticism of Adams’s “monarchical” attitudes.
By the early 1800s many people, regardless of political convictions, agreed that history was essential in the struggle of shaping a democratic American nation, and history, conceived of as civic education, entered school curricula in force. The emphasis on the American nation as a whole also shaped the work done in the by then numerous local and regional historical societies. One strove to demonstrate the contribution of one’s locality, state, or region to the national cause. A great mass of documents was collected, preserved, recorded, and published. From this ground, saturated with historical enthusiasm, rose the great American histories of the middle and later 1800s.
World History
