Pennmanship

William Penn played politics and won a king's ransom in the form of a colony

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture. 

The man who founded one of the largest and most successful colonial enterprises ever launched in the western hemisphere belonged to a fringe religious sect known as the Quakers. Quakers were part of the long tail of the Reformation. Actually, they were a breakaway faction of the breakaway Puritans. The sect was born in the mid-seventeenth England under the leadership of George Fox, a weaver who emerged as a religious savant amid the political turmoil of the English Civil War. Fox named his group The Society of Friends; they got their nickname for the way they allegedly shook or trembled when they experienced union with God. English Puritan reformers were trying to reform the clergy; Fox argued that the faithful could do without clergy altogether. He and like-minded believers embraced a simple practice of worship that involved gathering in meetinghouses and sitting silently until – literally – the spirit moved someone to speak, an experience of growing tension and intensity that often led to the so-called quaking.

Such experiences made everything else secondary, if not dispensable. Walk into a Catholic Church to this day and one will see a large, graphic piece of piece of religious inconography in the form of a crufix with a bleeding Christ nailed to the cross. It gets your attention and commands reverence. Walk into a mainstream Protestant denominational church like that of the Anglicans, and one will find a simple, abstract cross. Walk into a Quaker meetinghouse, however, and you will find plain white walls. (Needless to say, there will be no stained glass windows, not to mention a minister). This emphasis on simplicity would prove durably attractive; today people with little in the way of religious inclinations themselves admire everything about the Quakers from their furniture to their pacifism.

There was a curiously aggressive quality to Quaker simplicity, however. Quakers insisted on using informal pronouns like “thee” and “thou” instead of “you” and “your” with everyone, and refused to remove their hats for anyone, rituals of religious egalitarianism that caused them no end of trouble when dealing with government authorities who did not deal kindly with those unwilling to show due deference. Quakers also had a disturbing tendency to go naked in public, a statement of transparency that could be a little hard to take. All of this might not have been so bad if the they had not also proselytized, amid many official and unofficial warnings that they desist, in civic places. At a time when there was a growing consensus in England and elsewhere that people could worship as they wished in private or secluded settings, Quakers got in your face. Nicely.

At the heart of the Quaker vision of life was an affirmation of “the inner light,” a belief in the holiness of every person that allowed them to know right and to do good. In a sense, this was the worst of all Puritan worlds: an Antinomian conceit that one can know the will of God coupled, with a retrograde Catholic notion that good works can become a means of salvation. Quakers drove lots of people crazy, but Puritans in particular hated their flat rejection of predestination. Mary Dyer, a Quaker friend of Anne Hutchinson who repeatedly refused to comply with her banishment, was finally hanged for her intransigence. And yet, like the Puritans and many other Protestant dissidents, Quakers weathered multiple forms of adversity, managing to grow in numbers and cross the Atlantic. And like the Puritans, too, they proved to be skilled traders and became increasingly prosperous.

William Penn was the most famous Quaker in American history – and a highly unlikely one. Here, truly, was a man to the manor born, the son of a successful Admiral who largely managed to stay on the good side of King Charles I, the regime of Oliver Cromwell that overthrew him, and the restored monarchy of Charles II (which strikes me as more impressive than his naval accomplishments, which included adding the fabulously profitable island of Jamaica to the England’s portfolio). His namesake would inherit his father’s money along with his social skills.

At first, young William Penn did not appear especially unusual among men of his class, then or later. He went to good schools, traveled widely, and embraced fads like French fashion. His Quakerism, which he picked up from a missionary in Ireland, initially seemed to his father part of a passing phase like venereal disease – irritating for sure, but not something that prevented his son from taking on responsibilities like helping put down an insurrection there and managing the family estate. But though he put it aside for a time, the younger Penn’s adopted faith became an increasingly important, and obvious, dimension of his life. In the famous words of English writer Samuel Pepys, “Mr. Will Pen, who is lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some melancholy thing.” (Maybe drug addiction is a better analogy than VD.)

Like his compatriots, Penn was disputatious: he frequently got into arguments, staged formal debates, and wrote prodigiously in promoting Quakerism and the right of good English subjects to practice it. Such habits frequently got him thrown in jail, but his social connections also repeatedly got him out. Actually, Penn is an important figure in Anglo-American jurisprudence for his success in prevailing in a landmark legal dispute, the Bushel Case (1670), where a judge’s repeated overturning of Penn’s acquittal for unlawful assembly was declared illegal. (Edward Bushel was one of the jurors imprisoned for his refusal to convict Penn and his co-defendants.)

But Penn’s greatest talent may well have been his ability to make strange bedfellows. One of the most confusing aspects of his career is his sustained good terms with King Charles II and his brother James, the former a closet Catholic and the latter an avowed one. The royal family seems to have viewed Penn’s youthful shenanigans indulgently, apparently with sympathetic affection for Penn’s father. (The Stuart monarchs have been fairly criticized on any number of counts, but they have always seemed less doctrinaire in their personal lives than the often self-righteous Puritans and Anglicans who surrounded them.) It was in the mid-seventeenth century that the modern political system that pitted reform-minded Whigs against more traditionalist Tories first emerged, and for most of his career the younger Penn was affiliated with the former, notwithstanding his sometime awkward relations with both factions arising from his increasingly common presence at court.

There was, nevertheless, an element of logic in Penn’s relationship with the Stuarts, especially James, who became King in 1685. In important respects Quakers and Catholics were about as far apart as one could get on a Christian spectrum. Actually, there have been doubts, then and since, about whether Quakers are in fact Christians at all, given a persistent vein in their thinking that has challenged the divinity of Christ, an argument Penn himself made in the 1660s that got him in serious trouble before he backtracked in order to get out of prison. But Quakers and Catholics alike were subject to harassment and criticism, both in the social realm as well as in the laws passed by Parliament, and both had an interest in promoting the right of conscience.

Penn’s father died in 1670, shortly after his son’s success in the Bushel Case. By that point the two men had made their peace with each other, and Penn inherited a substantial estate. Over the course the next decade he was drawn to the center of an increasingly complex and volatile political situation, caught in the middle between Whig allies trying to check the Stuarts and prevent the Catholic James from succeeding to the throne on one side, and his personal ties to the dynasty on the other. It was also in these years that both Crown and Parliament were seeking tighter controls over England’s North American colonies.

In the midst of all this, Penn managed to draw the political equivalent of an inside straight. Until this point he had shown little interest in America, despite its evident attraction to many of his fellow Quakers. But he was beginning to feel his situation and that of the Friends was growing increasingly difficult. Penn’s father had loaned Charles II a substantial sum of money; it was far from clear when or if it would ever be paid back. Penn managed to diplomatically suggest the debt could be painlessly discharged by granting him a piece of remote real estate on the other side of the world. The King liked the idea, so much so that he gave Penn a tract that was bigger than England itself and convinced his brother to drop his claims on the territory we have come to known as Delaware. Though he was planning on taking away the charters of recalcitrant colonies like Massachusetts and centralizing colonial government generally, the King clearly considered a splashy gift to a vocal dissident who happened to be a trusted ally a good political move. Charles even named the grant; Penn was planning on calling it “Sylvania,” but the King demanded it be dubbed Pennsylvanvia: Penn’s Woods. It was officially established as a colony in 1682.

Penn’s gift came with all manner of complications. His territory, sandwiched between New York, Maryland, and the murkily organized New Jersey, would provide an endless series of border headaches. The English government imposed all kinds of trading restrictions, and the notoriously independent minded Quakers had their own ideas about governance. But Penn threw himself into this new project with boundless energy. As one of his recent biographers has written, for him “religion was an experience, not an intellectual process.” It was also one that spoken to a core precept of his faith: a sense of agency that allowed him to act as he saw fit. As Penn once said, “Godliness don’t turn Man out of the World, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it.” [191,63]. Endeavor Penn did.

To that end he made a series of important decisions that would decisively shape the fate of Pennsylvania, embodied in the famous Frame of Government that he drafted before leaving England. Among its key provisions were religious tolerance for all who believed in God, the same civil rights to settlers as were available in England, and scrupulous care in negotiating with Indians (indeed, Pennsylvania became a haven for harassed Indian tribes). The government would consist of a governor, a 72-member council, and – an important innovation – a 500-seat general assembly. Penn would have veto power, but he assumed he wouldn’t really need it: popular will and executive will would dovetail in what would literally and figuratively be a Society of Friends.

 Penn would be repeatedly frustrated in this assumption. He was forced to revise his Frame repeatedly, and for the rest of his life – only a few years of which were actually spent in Pennsylvania – he wrangled with the government and people of Pennsylvania over how the colony should be ruled and over rents he expected but rarely received. (He was almost broke when he received Pennsylvania, and bad financial decisions hobbled his fortunes until his death in 1718.) For the next century, Pennsylvania would be among the most fractious of Great Britain’s American colonies, and among the most politically divided at the time of the American Revolution.

Part of Penn’s problems stemmed from a seeming contradiction that probably appears a lot more glaring to us than it did him and many of his contemporaries: he was a Quaker aristocrat. Though he embraced many of the egalitarian tenets of his faith, Penn always acted with the serene confidence of a member of a small national elite, and expected others to recognize him as such. Regarding other people as spiritual equals did not necessarily mean you regard them as a social equals, and even if you do regard them as social equals, that doesn’t necessarily mean you regard them as a political or economic ones. Quakers were not communists, especially as they grew more prosperous, and while many opposed slavery, for example, it’s also clear that many did not. (Slavery didn’t even begin to become illegal in Pennsylvania until 1780, on a basis of gradual abolition.) Notions of equality are always relative.

That said, Penn never seemed to realize that a substantial and growing number of his fellow Quakers had a wider and deeper notion of equality than he did. He was surprised and hurt when they did not simply passively accept his leadership – or in many cases actively rejected it, as when they refused to pay taxes to defray the costs of his colonial experiment. Penn’s heirs (he had eight children with two wives over the course of his long life) proved less interested than he was in Quakerism. In the decades before the American Revolution the omnipresent Benjamin Franklin took the lead in resisting what many residents regarded as the family’s high-handedness.

And yet for all this, Pennsylvania was a fabulous success. Penn’s decision to make his colony a uniquely open place made it the magnet he hoped it would be, and though it was the penultimate of the 13 colonies to be founded (Georgia came along in 1732) it was among the largest in population by the time of the Revolution. He had been dealt a very good card in its access to the Delaware Bay, which he exploited in personally laying out the broad avenues for the city of Philadelphia, which became the biggest city in America by the time of the Revolution, second only in the Anglo world to London. After the Revolution, the state became the linchpin of the nation, a major source of its agricultural productivity and industrial prowess.

It would be inaccurate to say that William Penn single-handedly brought this about – for one thing, he was the product of a religious culture that profoundly shaped his choices. But few individuals have acted in ways that have had more profound and durable consequences. In an evocative 1983 essay Edmund Morgan summed up his life: “He made his mark because what he wanted and argued for, pleaded for, almost fought for was not quite outside the possible. He left his mark because he knew how he world worked and was prepared, in spite of its denunciations, to work within its terms.” [147] Penn chose an identity, and with it he fashioned a world. 

Next: some closing thoughts on God and the self-made man

Anne Hutchinson's (high) way

The Puritan as individualist

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

 

Not all Puritans who insisted on taking Puritan ideas to their logical conclusion fared nearly as well as Roger Williams did. Anne Hutchinson, who arrived in 1634, also rejected what she regarded as the hopeless compromises she saw around her. If Williams was one of those deeply genial people who are so intriguing because you always sense that for all their niceness they’re also holding something back, Hutchinson seemed to have a talent for alienating people wherever she went. It is an article of faith among modern scholars that this is because she was a woman, and I have little doubt this was part of the story. But to see her fate solely in such terms is to miss the profound challenge posed in the deeply subversive implications of asserting that people should live by their own lights, a challenge she issued even more directly than Williams did.

Hutchinson was born in 1591 as Anne Marbury, the daughter of a committed preacher who was repeatedly jailed for propounding heretical doctrines. She married William Hutchinson, a wealthy merchant, and bore him 15 children. Around the time of their wedding the Hutchinsons began attending the sermons of John Cotton; when he emigrated to America they decided to follow him. Though Cotton criticized Williams’s radicalism, he was initially approving of the highly learned Hutchinson, very much her father’s daughter. She soon became part of an influential circle that included the politically-connected Henry Vane, another recent arrival who briefly displaced John Winthrop as governor of the colony. (Such factionalism was an additional reason, along with her gender, why Hutchinson’s status proved volatile). She soon became known for the brilliant discussion circle she hosted at home to discuss religious experience.

Perhaps not surprisingly, such events generated curiosity – and resentment. The flashpoint of conflict centered on one of the great theological debates of the era: whether the basis of salvation should rest on a covenant of works or a covenant of faith. For the Puritans, there was no question it was the latter: grace was the gift of God, not something one earned by virtue of one’s deeds (an oxymoron, given the insufficiency and sinfulness of the human heart). Hutchinson reputedly complained that the preaching she was hearing, Cotton’s excepted, smacked of crypto-Catholic covenant of works rhetoric (this even though a sixteenth century Dutch Protestant theologian, Jacobus Arminius, also affirmed a covenant of works).

Even more provocative were the barely veiled implications of Hutchinson’s assertions. If, as Puritans ritualistically affirmed, only God knew who was saved, and if – as seemed quite likely to at least some observers – civil and clerical authorities were as likely as not agents of damnation, then why should they be blindly respected, much less obeyed? It was not hard to hear overtones of what we would call anarchism in such talk (the Puritans’ term was “antinominianism,” from the Greek anti-nomos, against the law). As such this was a matter of church and state. New Englanders were generally careful – more careful than most, notwithstanding the common misperception that the region was as theocracy – to separate the two, in large measure because they wanted to protect the church from the state. When dissidents were legally prosecuted, it was explicitly because of the challenge they posed to secular order, a necessity in God’s fallen world.

 In the case of Williams, dealing with such challenges to social order was reasonably straightforward, since he was a public figure. Hutchinson’s case was more ambiguous, since it was not clear she could be prosecuted, or on what basis, particularly given the standard defense of private personal conscience. But government authorities decided to investigate and called her before the General Court in 1637. (A separate church inquiry would follow.)

 The surviving trial record suggests that for much of the inquiry Hutchinson ran circles around her interrogators, sacred and secular (ministers were invited to participate in the civil hearing), clearly recognizing the relatively weak hand the General Court was playing and sustained by supporters who also attended. “I am called here to answer you but I hear no charge,” she observes at one point in the proceedings.

 “I have told you some already and more I can tell you,” Governor Winthrop replies.

“Name one,” she retorts.

And so it goes. Hutchinson volleys scripture with the best of them, and looks as if she might really prevail until, in a moment of overreaching, she was pressed to explain the basis of her faith in her own conscience, and replies, “by an immediate revelation.” This was a big mistake: it was an article of faith that God no longer spoke directly to human beings as he had to the Israelites in days of old, even if, as philo-Semites, they considered themselves the thirteenth tribe in the new Promised Land. Hutchinson was branded a heretic, subsequently excommunicated in her church trial, and banished from Massachusetts. She and her husband made their way to Rhode Island, where William Hutchinson became embroiled in the colony’s divisive politics. After his death in 1641 Hutchinson made her way to Dutch New Amsterdam, where in 1643 she ignored a warning to flee an Indian attack and was murdered near the highway that now bears her name.

Again: what interests me here is less the way Hutchinson was a deviant than in the way she captured a core characteristic of Puritans in particular and New Englanders in general in colonial America: their tendency – whether recognized, honored, or not – to rely on their own judgment. This sense of self-reliance in the spiritual realm clearly carried over into secular affairs, which can help explain not only why they came to America in the first place but ultimately why the were in the cockpit of an independence movement in 1776 that was for a long time couched in terms of defending a 150 year tradition of liberty, one they refused to sacrifice on an altar of taxation without representation.

My caveat nevertheless bears repeating: neither Roger Williams, nor Anne Hutchinson, nor any of their contemporaries should be considered self-made.  They pointed the way, they fashioned new worlds, but they were too deeply invested in seeing themselves as servants of Christ, devoting their God-given gifts in the service of that enterprise. Their self-reliance was a process of elimination – a suspicion others could not be trusted that led them back to themselves by default.

As they were uncomfortably aware, however, there were interlopers in their midst who had more avowed confidence than they did in the power of their own reason. The Puritans loathed these people – Williams, at the outer perimeter of his tolerance, described them as “these poor filthy dreamers”[60]– and persecuted them to the point of execution. They were known, pejoratively, as Quakers, and it is their greatest American exponent, William Penn, who brings us one step closer to self-making. 

Next: The making of William Penn (and his colony)

Tolerating Roger Williams

An orthodox rebel makes his own new world

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

The first vivid landmark in the long-term transformation from God-made man to self-made man is furnished by Roger Williams. Williams was an ordained minister in the Church of England who had studied at Cambridge with the great English jurist Edward Coke. Like a lot of Pilgrims and Puritans, Williams thought long and hard before declaring his dissidence, and like them grappled – perhaps agonized is a better word – over whether or not to renounce it, and what church to join. The Pilgrims, of course, had decided to abandon the Church of England entirely. The founders of Massachusetts Bay, whom Williams joined the year after their arrival in 1630, did not formally renounce their ties for another generation.* In some ways, that made their situation more difficult, because they had to weigh how much of the backsliding and corruption they could safely tolerate.

Williams, as it turned out, could tolerate very little. Eagerly received in Boston – trained ministers were a scarce commodity – he immediately alienated his hosts by declining to serve as assistant minister in the Boston church because he found it insufficiently rigorous. Williams was then invited to join the church in the town of Salem, which was further along toward the Separatist end of the spectrum. The Boston authorities warned that church this would be an impolitic move, however, and the offer was withdrawn. In 1632 Williams then did the logical thing and proceeded to Plymouth, where his brand of Separatism was explicitly embraced. But he didn’t fare well there, either, in part because he continued an unnerving habit of asking the question whether New England authorities had negotiated in good faith with area Indians before taking over the land they occupied – and whether in the fact the King had a legal basis for governing it. His controversial opinions led to him back to Salem, where he took on unofficial duties at the church. When Massachusetts officials got wind of Williams’s ongoing propensity to make questionable assertions, he was hauled before the colony’s General Court in 1634. He was able to smooth over the conflict that time, in part by promising not to raise the issue of whether the colony was founded on legitimate terms. When, as acting pastor of the church, he did so again, Williams was tried and convicted for heresy and sedition in 1635. His sentence was banishment. Rather than wait to be forcibly removed, which would have probably involved being shipped back to England, Williams braved a severe New England snowstorm and made his way to Narragansett Bay, where he founded a colony he called Providence in 1636.

Roger Williams was clearly an unusual man. And yet even as he was understood by himself and others to be a maverick, he was, in a way that matters decisively here, the quintessential Puritan. At the very heart of the Protestant experience in general, and the Puritan imagination in particular, was an insistence on the primacy of one’s own conscience. One of the major problems with the Catholic Church from a Protestant perspective was the way in which priests mediated between God and his people. That mediation was both (inevitably) corrupt and unnecessary. Puritans placed particular emphasis on people experiencing the word of Christ themselves, which is one reason why they placed such emphasis on the written world, even as they continued to rely on trained interpretation of clergy – who, nevertheless, they chose (and paid) to minister to their spiritual health. With remarkable rapidity, seventeenth century New England became of the most literate places on the face of the earth; the first printing press in English North America was established at Cambridge in 1638, a time when the Puritans were hardly out of the woods in any sense. Their desire, their need, to actively exercise their faith was hugely important.

But for that very reason, they felt compelled to temper that passion. Their insistence on a deeply personal, intimate relationship with Christ could not could not be allowed to reach a point where they believed they had some special knowledge or insight about God’s will: this was precisely the source of their grievance with Rome. They were deeply mindful of the sin of pride because they were so susceptible to it. This is why they agonized about whether they should leave a church that was not to their liking: was it their conscience or their vanity speaking? So it was that the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop, admonished his fellow migrants in his famous address “A Model of Christian Charity,” that “no man is made more honorable than another, or more wealthy, etc., of out any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his creation and the common good of the creature, man.” Common good. As he famously said later in the same address, “we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and the community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”

It has long been recognized that the Puritans were among the most communitarian people who settled English North America. Certainly they were more so than the adventurers of Virginia (who, as I will explain, developed their own version of the self-made man). But one way of reading the repeated refrain of togetherness in “A Model of Christian Charity” is as a warning: you don’t have to remind people to stick together unless you have some concern they won’t. And, in fact, the Puritans were notable for their tendency to scatter: New Haven, Hartford, New Hampshire (a colony which had already been established, but which they overran), not to mention the multiple towns that sprang up within them: all these colonies represented splinter groups who created new settlements out of a desire to do their own thing, spiritually and otherwise, even as they hesitated to renounce the Church of England entirely.

And this is what made Williams the Puritan par excellence. He founded – and in a half-century as a tireless administrator, solidified and protected – Rhode Island as a haven of tolerance. It’s important to make clear, however, that this was simply a means to an end: Williams wanted the right to worship as he (and he alone, as he refused to pray even with his wife) saw fit. He did help establish the first Baptist church in America, but his solitary spirit – what he himself described as “the restless unsatisfiedness of my soul” (Gausted 182) – a quickly asserted itself and he left it. Williams has long been recognized for his unusually good relationships with Native Americans, in part because he learned their language and bargained with them in good faith. But at some level he was comfortable with Indians because in their paganism they posed no risk of Christian hypocrisy. Figuratively speaking, he belonged to a congregation of one.

 Given this disposition, what may be most striking of all about is the way he somehow managed to stay on remarkably good terms with so many people. (He did have a long-running argument with the Puritan minister John Cotton, the opening salvo of which, the 1644 tract “The Bloody Tenet of Persecution,” used the word “bloody” in something resembling the modern profane sense of the term.) John Winthrop opposed Williams before the General Court expelled him, and yet the two enjoyed a cordial correspondence for many years. One of the many roles Williams played was that of diplomat, serving as mediator between the English and Indians in a variety of capacities. He was not always successful – the outbreak of King Philip’s War, the bloodiest per capita in American history, ravaged Rhode Island along with the rest of New England – but few people in American history have come as close as he did in hewing a world of his own making from the sheer force of his philosophical vision. In the words of the great Puritan scholar Edmund Morgan, “Never was a man of action more an intellectual.” 

Next: Anne Hutchinson sees for herself

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* After a Civil War of the 1640s in which the Puritans in England prevailed, the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, at which point the Pilgrims finally gave up and founded what we have come to know as the Congregational Church, one of the more loosely federated denominations within American Protestantism. A political merger between the Puritans and Pilgrims occurred when Plymouth became part of Massachusetts in 1691.

God-made men (duh)

The self-made man may be a materialistic notion, but it's got theological foundations 

The following post is part of a series of drafts on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

As I’ve indicated, the phrase “self-made man” has its problems in the twenty-first century United States. But even its critics know what it means (or is supposed to mean). In the seventeenth century, by contrast – the century in which the foundations for a distinctively American identity were laid – the concept would be superficially comprehensible, but nonsensical, to almost anyone who heard it, akin to suggesting that dogs are responsible for the economic welfare. (God makes men. Who else could?) If one were explain the idea behind the self-made man to a colonial American, particularly in seventeenth century New England, its implications would be so blasphemous as to merit possible criminal action by church and even government authorities. And yet, insofar as the phrase did eventually make sense in the centuries that followed, its intellectual contours took shape in the seventeenth century. And, notwithstanding its plurality of meanings – I’ll be looking a somewhat different version of the idea in colonial America in the next chapter – those origins are, in a fundamental sense, theological.

To understand why, we need to go back to that pivotal event in Western civilization, the Protestant Reformation. As we were all taught at one time or another, a  precipitating grievance involved the use of papal indulgences, in which the severity of penance for confessed sin was mitigated by some form of payment charged by church officials. One reason why we were all taught this is that it rankles in a way even a child can understand: it’s unfair for the rich to buy their way out of punishment simply by virtue of their wealth. But the more specifically religious objection, one articulated by Protestant lights such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, focused on the idea that only God, not man, was in a position to decide upon and dispense salvation.

This was sixteenth century common sense, even if like, later forms of common sense (such as the proposition that bankers cannot really be trusted to regulate themselves), it had been overlooked or explained away. But now, for reasons that even after centuries of reasoned analysis remain a little mysterious, a relatively large number of people, with motives that varied from spiritual commitment to economic calculation, decided the offense would be ignored no longer. Of course, there were also a lot of people who, while not necessarily inclined to defend indulgences, did not feel such questionable practices justified a break with the Church of Rome. Sometimes that disinclination was passive. Other times it was so powerful as to trigger a counteroffensive (in the form of Jesuits, inquisitions, armies) that resulted in century of bloody conflict.

One person who decided to make a break with the Church, for reasons that were largely opportunistic, was King Henry VIII of England. As the story goes, he was angry over being denied his request for an annulment that would allow him to remarry and produce a legitimate male heir. (As his advisers pointed out, there were also the rents from church lands that would become his once he confiscated them.) In England, as elsewhere, this decision provoked widespread conflict, and there, as elsewhere, it aroused passions sufficient to lead people to kill each other in the name of Christ. When, after a protracted struggle, Henry’s (second) daughter Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she shrewdly decided to steer a middle course. Yes, she affirmed, England would remain Protestant. But her interests in saying so were less religious than political: it was stability she cared about. As such, she was as tough, even tougher, on die-hard reformers as she was on closet Catholics, among them, it was widely believed, James I, the distant relative of Scotland’s Stuart family she chose to succeed her, which he did in 1603.

From a twenty-first century standpoint, the religious intensity of the Anglo-American world between 1600 and 1700 is truly astounding. (After coming across so many references to the Pope as “the whore of Babylon,” I’ve concluded this was not an act of hyperbole or sarcasm but a deeply ingrained reflex on the part of people who have done a very good job of refining their hatred.) Of course, there have been religious fanatics in all times and places, along with times and places where religion, while almost always important, has not really been at the center of social conflict or intellectual innovation. But in terms of sheer intensity, and a willingness to accept real-world consequences of allowing abstract theological ideas to shape everyday life, this epoch strikes me as pretty high up on an imagined scale.

One reason I say so is the sheer variety of religiosity at the time. Henry VIII created the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church, which we today know as the Episcopal Church, a name that refers to the way bishops are organized. But the Church of England was regarded by some as a cheap knock-off of the Catholic Church, a perception that can be traced back to the reasons for its creation. (To this day Anglicans and Catholics are doctrinally close, notwithstanding the liberal wing of the former’s acceptance of female clergy and homosexuality.) As a result, a series of now-obscure splinter groups proliferated: Brownists, Gortonists, Diggers, Barrowists, et. al. These factions had strong social, intellectual and personal connections with religious dissidents on the continent. Their doctrinal ideas have a tendency to make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over, much in the way that adolescent distinctions between specific sub-varieties of obscure music amount to the narcissism of small differences. But there’s no doubt that these dissidents took those differences seriously, to the point of willingness to risk arrest, imprisonment and execution for being real and perceived challenges to social order.

A second striking aspect of this religious culture is its ridiculously messianic quality: so many of these people believed that England – England! – was to be the site of a coming new world order. Why would a small, relatively insignificant island-state on the edge of Europe be God’s chosen vessel of redemption?  Yes, England had been the home of the fourteenth century anticlerical writer John Wycliffe, a.k.a. “the morning star of the Reformation.” Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, a heretical act in an era when reading, much less interpreting, scripture was considered the exclusive Latin-educated experts. His followers were known as Lollards (a derogatory term suggesting idiocy or laziness). But to an outsider, then or since, such hardly seems the stuff of a sturdy foundation for England as the site of the next Zion.

Actually, by the early seventeenth century some of the most committed Protestant dissidents had also come to the conclusion that England was not likely to be Zion, particularly because they were subject to political pressure from James I, who famously vowed to “harry them out of the land.” That’s why a group of them left England altogether and settled first in Amsterdam and then the Dutch city of Leiden, neither of which they found satisfactory. They were looking for the freedom to worship God as they saw fit, which, among other things, meant rejecting the self-evident corruptions they saw around them, whether in the form of crypto-Catholic practices of the Anglican Church – which they formally abandoned, and were thus known as “Separatists” – or what they considered the turpitude of the Dutch, whose tolerance of religious diversity was less a matter of moral principle than appalling indifference. These Pilgrims, as they were also known, made there way across the ocean to the place they named after their hometown of Plymouth in 1620. They were followed a decade later by another group of dissidents – albeit dissidents who did not renounce their ties to the Church of England, which they still hoped to reform – who founded Massachusetts Bay.

Which brings us to the third, and most striking, thing about these dissidents: how far, literally and figuratively, they were willing to go for their beliefs. The word used to describe them, once fairly broad, but which gradually focused on the founders of Massachusetts Bay, was “Puritan.” It was not meant to be flattering. “We call you Puritans, not because you are purer than other men . . . but because you think yourselves to be purer,” wrote an English clergyman early in the century. Ever since, Puritanism has been considered a byword for sanctimony.

There are many reasons why this was true in the context of their world, but the most important for our purposes goes back to this crucial notion that God, and God alone, shapes the destiny of humankind. Even the Pope himself – officially designated the Antichrist with the ratification of the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646*  – would assent to this as a general proposition. But like the signatories of Westminster Confession (mostly Anglican and Presbyterian, a Scottish branch of Puritanism), the Pilgrims and Puritans were Calvinists. At the core of John Calvin’s theology was a special insistence that the salvation or damnation of an individual soul was known to God, but unknown to that individual, from birth, and that such people were powerless to affect their fate beyond acknowledging the force of the irresistible grace that might be conferred upon them.  It’s why, for example, they did not celebrate Christmas, or rejected papist ornamentation in their churches. Such affections were symptomatic of a pagan notion that men could in any way replicate a reality whose prerogative was God’s alone.

These practices were indeed radical when compared with most of their contemporaries on either side of the ocean. But – and this is a crucial point, especially when considering the eventual emergence of the self-made man – these early settlers of the region that became known as New England had a strong pragmatic streak that governed their behavior. God alone knows, and God alone decides. The man you think of as a saint may really be a sinner; the woman you consider a sinner may really be a saint. But someone has to be in charge, if for no other reason than sheer survival in a forbidding wilderness in which they were surrounded by any number of natural and supernatural forces of evil. Their necessarily communitarian enterprise relied on leadership, both religious and civic, to execute one of the more daring resettlement projects of human history.

You may wonder: Why did they do it? If they had no control over their fate, if they could never know if their efforts would matter, then what was the point of going through all that trouble? The characteristic reaction of most modern-day people when presented with Calvinistic logic is: Well, hell, then – let’s party hard. But that’s not the way Calvinists thought about it. Simply put, it was hard to believe that such an approach was going to get you into heaven. Sure, it might, but in the meantime you’ve got to live with yourself. And it’s easier to live with yourself thinking that your inclinations are those of God, and insofar as you have to guess what they are, a life of dissipation seems like the least plausible scenario. It’s possible to view the entire colossal enterprise of founding a new society in a forbidding wilderness on the other side of the world as a collective attempt to escape the distracting question of whether or not you’re among the damned or not. (And, once you’ve done that, to establish a modern economy, as Max Weber persuasively theorized in his 1918 book The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.)

In any event, the Pilgrims and Puritans had made some loopholes for themselves, as human beings tend to do whenever they impose rules on themselves.  One was the doctrine of preparationism, whereby a spirit of humility, a desire to confess one’s sins, and a willingness to listen hard to the yearnings of conscience might – might – indicate sanctification, allowing one to experience the joy of incipient salvation (and, if convincing enough in one’s testimony, to be accepted as a member of a church). There was also the so-called Halfway Covenant, in which the children and grandchildren of church members could be provisionally accepted into the church pending later persuasive testimony of an authentic conversion experience. Through such strategies, the Pilgrims and Puritans found ways to grapple with the profoundly challenging tenets of their faith over the course of multiple generations.

Here’s the rub: a number of Puritans vocally opposed such measures. There were, for example, many critics of the Halfway Covenant; Yale College was founded in 1701 as an alternative to Harvard by explicitly rejecting it the training of its ministers. But long before that ever happened, a series of opponents to any compromise in Pilgrim and Puritan theology insisted on taking their doctrines to their logical conclusion. In the process of doing so, they revealed the individualism at the heart of the New England enterprise and pointed the way toward the emergence of a recognizable self-made man. 

 Next: Roger Williams, orthodox rebel

---

*Other Anglo-American denominations signed on the Westminister Confession later in the century. The Pope lost his Antichrist status in the United States – officially, anyway – with revisions to the document in 1789. He would reacquire it – unofficially, anyway – with the rising tide of Irish immigration a half-century later.

The second day

In Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, Mike Rose illuminates the possible lives of students too often overlooked.

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

The 2011 Tom Hanks film Larry Crowne isn't a very good movie -- it isn't even really a very good Tom Hanks movie -- but it is salutary in one very important respect. In telling the story of a laid-off retail worker who goes back to community college, the film focuses attention on the reality of higher education in contemporary life: that the typical undergraduate is not the 18-22 year old attending a four-year liberal arts institution who tends to get most of the attention in contemporary educational discourse. Instead, the middle-aged title character finds himself immersed in a polyglot community of adults (some young, some less so) striving to pick up lost threads or missed opportunities.

This is a story that Mike Rose knows well. Rose has spent a long and illustrious career chronicling the lives of working-class people striving for dignity in work, in school and in the connection between them. In Back to School, he focuses specifically on returning students, and passionate hopes as well as serious obstacles apparent in settings where the American Dream is won and lost most vividly.

Rose, who teaches at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies,  is a policy wonk -- he navigates debates between those who advocate college for all versus those who emphasize vocational training, among others -- but a strong empirical empathy animates his work. You'll find data-driven metrics here, but the heart of the book rests on close observation of the realities and aspirations of individual lives, which are limned with economy and insight. (In this regard, his work is strongly reminiscent of the work of my late father-in-law, education reformer Ted Sizer.) This sense of intimacy with his subjects makes clear what statistics often show: that resumed educations are often marked by false starts, unrealized remediation, and unachieved benchmarks. It also makes clear what statistics don't: often invisible barriers involving health, employment and childcare; heroic persistence; slow but steady progress. In recent years, elected officials have shown increasing awareness that community and vocational schools have been overlooked as hugely valuable social resources. While the attention is bracing, Rose is concerned that they may end up even more overburdened than they already are, and subject to unrealistic expectations. Impatient officials are anxious to cut remedial programs, for example, unaware that they've always been a staple of such institutions, and require more, not less support.

Which is not to say that Rose is an apologist for them. He's particularly concerned about the way basic courses in a variety of subjects assume a lowest-common denominator pedagogy that's been in place for almost a century. Rather than teach students using materials developed with children in mind, he advocates a more richly contextualized approach attentive the lived experiences, social capital, and intellectual curiosity even the least prepared students bring to the classroom. (Such an approach would require comparable attention paid to the faculty for such courses, who are typically poorly trained and compensated for such work.) He argues for a similarly integrated approach to vocational training, with literacy and numeracy woven into the fabric of instruction. He gives examples where such instruction is taking place.

Above all, Rose is a pragmatist. Certainly, he says community colleges need more money, recognizing the headwinds any such assertions face. But his ideas are also granular and concrete: improving signage in academic buildings; explaining how the index or glossary of a book works; considering the way courses are numbered and combined. He understands that there can be honest disagreements about how much freedom or structure students should be given, and appreciates -- as anyone who listens to such students must -- how important getting a job is as a justification for getting an associate or bachelor's degree. But he finally insists on the civic dimensions of even the most utilitarian of educations, and the dignity of even the most "menial" work. There's simply no such thing as unskilled labor.

In short, Rose's idealism is the best kind: informed, tough-minded, self-aware. Those of us who inhabit lives on the cushier side of the educational boundary should honor, and act upon, his profoundly democratic spirit.

Jim is observing the Labor Day holiday weekend, the punctuation mark of the summer before the official start of the school year. His current Kindle reading is Walter Issacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin, that most startlingly modern of Founding Fathers. Isaacson's portrait of Franklin is rendered with a journalistic flair that nevertheless shows real scrupulousness in his scholarship.

Beginning next week, two new sets of posts on the self-made man -- one on the relationship between God and the self-made man, and the other on the archetype of the yeoman farmer -- will begin running on this site. Until then, best to all for a felicitous final stretch of leisure.

Starved for attention

In The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, John Kelly tells a tragic tale of national resilience

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

It was the blurbs that caught my attention on this one. Richard Rhodes, Douglas Brinkley, Adam Hochschild: these are heavy hitters. (Bill Clinton doesn't hurt, but he's not a master prose stylist.) John Kelly is no slouch either, having produced a string of well-regarded books, notably The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death (2006). He picked a worthy subject in taking on the Irish potato famine of 1845-47, a demographic catastrophe that killed twice as many people as the American Civil War and sliced Ireland's population by a third. As one might expect, Kelly approaches his subject from a multidisciplinary perspective that takes into account botany, politics, economics, and medicine. The result is a fully realized piece of history.

It's clear from the start that the famine, driven by a potato-destroying microbe that ravaged the European continent as well as the British isles, was going to be a disaster beyond the capacity of human prevention. The question was what was going to be done to mitigate it. The answer was also quickly apparent: not enough. The British governments of Robert Peel and John Russell faced dilemmas that remain depressingly modern: electorates controlled by rich and powerful elites that refused to shoulder the cost, and which showed an obsessive concern about creating government dependency, often going to bizarre extremes (like making people in workhouses wear straight, pointy shoes) to make welfare as uncomfortable as possible. Fears about waste and sapped personal incentive weren't exactly unfounded. But they were deeply myopic, and left millions dead and bereaved as a result.

That said, the crisis in Ireland was also exacerbated by specifically local traditions. An agrarian country in an industrializing Union, the island was strangled by the hold of its Anglo-Irish gentry, typified by Lord Palmerston (later British Prime Minister), who squawked at any mention of tax increases. When a poor relief levy based on the value of tenant holdings was rammed through over their objections, the big Irish landlords avoided paying it by evicting tenants with ruthless efficiency.

Kelly at one point mentions that the power of the gentry of highland Scotland had been circumvented in the nineteenth century via buying them out, a move that allowed that country to modernize. Significantly, Scotland did not suffer nearly as much as Ireland did from the famine. Kelly doesn't really develop this intriguing scenario, which seems to come as close as he gets to offering an alternative outcome. More often, he laments the cramped moral vision of bureaucrats like Charles Edward Trevelyan and editorial writers like those of the London Times, whose sometimes breathtaking callousness shows that Charles Dickens's Scrooge was no stereotype (though Dickens was no paragon of enlightenment himself when it came to the Irish).

In terms of narrative pacing, The Graves are Walking feels a bit pedestrian until Kelly shifts his focus away from government ministries more decisively to the situation on the ground as the famine takes root. These chapters are riveting and harrowing. Kelly charts the effects of starvation and the cascade of ills that surround it with precision, color, and empathy. As a case study in a public health challenge gone horribly awry, his account functions as a profound cautionary tale.

The Irish famine of the 1840s was also an event that triggered a global diaspora, and here too Kelly shines. He's particularly vivid in describing the impact of Irish immigration in Canada, which absorbed waves of illness that sent shock waves through Quebec and Montreal. American officials partially blunted that blow with taxes and regulations, though as we all know the effects were dramatic in the States as well, nowhere more than New York City, where 848,000 immigrants arrived between 1847 and 1851, about four times the population of mid-century Dublin and more than twice that of midcentury Manhattan. (The trip for many of these travelers sounds almost as bad as the middle passage of slaves.) The arrival of teeming, filthy, sick people hardly brought out the best in Americans, who developed a nativist animus against the Irish that would last for decades. Though it was hardly justified, Kelly makes it all too humanly understandable.

This is an upsetting, enlightening, necessary book that deserves multiple, durable audiences. It also stands as a testament to the resilience of a people under some of the greatest duress the world has ever seen.

Jim is taking a week-long vacation in Vermont with his family. He's managed to clear his reviewing docket and will be concentrating on reading for pleasure. First up: Archer Mayor's latest Joe Gunther mystery, Tag Man. All Mayor's novels are set in Vermont and are rich with New England color. Should be fun.

After that, it's on to Jon Meacham's 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion. (This biography in the long-intended-to-read category rose to the top after Jon Meacham interviewed/cited Jim's book The American Dream as part of a Time cover story last month.)


Later this month a series of posts on the mythology of the self-made man in American history will begin running on this site. The set first will be on the religious foundations of the concept; the second will look at the yeoman farmer as the oldest and most durable manifestation of the myth. As always, feedback is welcome.

Summer is rapidly drawing to a close. Best to all for a final stretch of hikes, ice cream and other rituals that play out before the Labor Day transition.

The American Revolution (of 1676)

In Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation of Colonial Virginia, James Rice unravels a tangled yarn

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    


James Rice explains in the afterword of this book (parts of which might have served better as a preface) that it is "a story, a narrative, a yarn." Once upon a time, making such an assertion about a work of history would have been tautological. But, he notes in an important counterintuitive observation, "such an approach is more controversial than one might imagine, because historians have a complicated relationship with narrative." Indeed, one might say the story of the profession in the last century has been the replacement of narrative with analysis -- of the what with the why. "Narrative is sneaky," he explains from the point of view of skeptics. "Its writers find it all too easy to smuggle into a story ideas and assertions that would not hold up if they were stated explicitly and accompanied by careful analysis of the evidence." Storytellers, in short, are often liars.

But Rice, a professor of history at SUNY Plattsburgh, asserts that the situation is not that simple. Unreliable narrators tell a kind of truth. Imposing structures on a story has the effect of revealing tensions that otherwise may not be apparent. He's right about that. (It's also a pleasure to find Jane Smiley, a novelist with more than a dollop of historical sophistication, in his footnotes.) Historians may like analysis, but readers need -- in a deep, anthropological way -- narratives. "Show, don't tell," has long been an axiom of non-fiction writing, historical and otherwise. But stories don't get shown; they get told. The key is telling them in compelling ways in which an analytic intelligence -- revealed in the choices the writer makes -- animates, without overshadowing, the tale.

So how does James Rice do in telling the story he does here, part of a Oxford University Press series called "New Narratives in American History"? The answer is quite well, even if his compact tale might have been tighter still.

He's got good, if challenging, material to deal with in Bacon's Rebellion, one of the more vivid and confusing episodes in American colonial history.  The great Edmund Morgan, whose presence looms large here, describes it as "a rebellion with abundant causes but without a cause." In the narrowest sense, Bacon's Rebellion was an uprising contained within the year 1676, when the elite transplant Nathaniel Bacon tapped a vein of populist resentment against local Indians -- essentially all Indians -- and demanded that colonial administration, led by long-time governor William Berkeley, deputize him to push them beyond their existing frontiers. Whether because of diplomatic caution or indifference to the plight of poor farmers (traditional accounts favor the latter, Rice leans toward the former) Berkeley angrily rejected the demands of Bacon and his followers, resulting in a brief but intense civil war that included raids against Indians as well as against the capital of Jamestown. Momentum swung wildly over a period of months, resulting in the exile of Berkeley until Bacon's unexpectedly early death, apparently from typhus contracted in the swampy climate led the insurrection to fizzle.

For Rice, however, Bacon's Rebellion was an event with roots and reverberations far beyond 1676.  Bacon's death represents on the first act of what he has structured as a two-act drama. In the second part of the book, he connects the uprising to a much broader set of issues that include struggles between Catholics and Protestants in late Stuart England and the instability of a single-crop tobacco economy in which low prices fed discontent, resulting in a 1682 incident in which protesters destroyed the crops of their neighbors. He also widens the geographic focus of the story to encompass the political landscape of New York and (especially) Maryland.

For Morgan, as for Rice, the the core source of all this unrest is racial. Morgan focused on African Americans in American Slavery, American Freedom; in Tales from a Revolution, however, Rice focuses on the Native Americans, those he describes as "the people with most at stake in the conflict." Though Indians figure in all accounts of the uprising,  Rice gives the Pamunkeys, Susquehannocks, and Piscataways more sustained and sympathetic attention than any recent account of Bacon's Rebellion. Which is a good and helpful thing in a story that manages to be brief and comprehensive.

It doesn't quite feel cohesive, however. There seem to be a lot of balls in the air here, and Rice's two-part segmentation feels a bit unwieldy and even strained, notwithstanding the fact that contemporaries (usually those defending the status quo) invoked Bacon as a cause of other woes years after his death. The treatment of the events that would culminate in the Glorious Revolution seems perfunctory; the move to incorporate other colonies leads one to wonder why the simultaneous King Philip's War in New England receives only passing mention. More than most events in American history, Bacon's Rebellion defies simple narration. One nevertheless finishes this book feeling like it might have worked better as a seamless garment whose implications were suggested rather than covered.

Still, Rice accomplishes a good deal with this provocative piece of storytelling. As a work of colonial history it is notably user-friendly and resonant. And as a work of historiography it poses pressing questions that all students of history should take seriously.

Invasive procedures

In Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe, Peter Heather rewrites broad swaths of history

The following has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network site.    


This book was supposed to be summertime leisure reading. I make no pretense toward familiarity with the historiography Roman Empire, whether early or late (I know more a little more about the republic than either). Actually, the subtitle of the book -- "the Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe" -- is misleading; as the author says explicitly, the former is only peripherally in his purview. What we really get here is a survey of what used to be called "the Dark Ages." It's a deeply suggestive one, not only an explanation of 500 years of history, but a model for thinking about the demographic dynamics of peoples much closer to home.

Seven hundred pages and two decades in the making, Empires and Barbarians has the heft of a generational statement. (First published by Macmillan in Britain in 2009, it has just been issued in paperback in the U.S. by Oxford.) As such, it can be considered a piece of counter-revisionism. Once upon a time, the story goes, the Roman Empire was destroyed when its ability to repel wave upon wave of barbarian hordes was finally worn down. After hundreds of years of trying, the marauders finally broke through in the fifth century CE, and, like drunken party guests, wrecked a civilization. In recent decades, however, this invasion hypothesis has been deconstructed. "Barbarians," after all, is a loaded term that reflected the ethnocentrism of Mediterraneans; what we were really seeing was an encounter between peoples. And they weren't hordes, either -- they were small groups of people, and very often what happened was not so much a violent overthrow of "civilization" (another loaded term) as a transfer of power from one elite to another. The old story said more about the nationalist preoccupations of the twentieth century (and the curious nationalism of Soviet bloc Marxists, who poured impressive resources into archeology) than the realities of the ancient world.

Peter Heather, a professor of Medieval History at Kings College, London, does not deny that the old version of the story is problematic. But he believes that the attempts to overturn it -- which have calcified into a refusal to consider evidence that doesn't comport with post-nationalist notions -- miss some important indications that there were, in fact significant, broad-based movements of people south and west into Europe in the second half of the first millennium. It's not that the revisionists are entirely wrong, or that their model has not applied in other historical circumstances -- the eleventh century Norman invasion of Britain is pretty much a textbook illustration of their notions. But it didn't really happen that way when the Angles and Saxons showed up 500 years earlier, or for that matter, in many other places on the continent in that era, either.

Here's the key to understanding what happened as far as Heather is concerned: a significant disequilibrium in development -- defined here in terms of resources, technological sophistication and political organization -- that evened out over a 500 year period. When the first millennium began, the wealth and power of Europe ran in a rough oval corresponding to the shores of the Mediterranean. Above it was a strip of loosely organized Germanic peoples whose contact with the Romans formed a frontier of intercultural contact. Above that was another frontier formed by the near outsiders with far ones.  As has been long understood, the end of Roman empire was not so much a matter of destruction by the near outsiders as it was far outsiders (like the notorious Huns) pushing their way into the turf of the near outsiders (like the Goths), who in turn pushed a weakened and distracted Western empire to collapse.

This was not a pretty process. It required a massive allocation of resources -- which had to be expropriated to attain the scale necessary for a successful push -- and required mobilization on a scale much more significant than anything that immediately preceded or followed it. The migration may not have been a billiard ball of people moving from one point to another, as the old Grand Narrative would have it. Instead, it was more like a snowball: not necessarily large at first, but increasingly and inevitably substantial, pulling women, children, and slaves along with it, if for no other reason as logistical support. (The book is salted with vivid analogies like this.) And it was highly dynamic, not just Germans sweeping into Rome, but Slavs sweeping onto German turf, and then Vikings sweeping onto Slavic turf. This transformation was nasty, brutish, and long. When it was over, the locus of civilization had shifted north and west and had taken on a Frankish hue. This is a big deal, an epochal change that turned the edge of a continental landmass into a place we have come to know as Europe.

I'm not in a good position to judge how iconoclastic an argument this really is in the context of its field (though I am familiar with the work of Brian Ward-Perkins, whose 2005 The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization I found quite edifying, and which seems consonant with Heather's findings here). But as Heather wrote of Ostogroths and Magyars -- with occasional references to Rwandans and Kosovars as a point of comparsion -- I found myself thinking of Puritans and Algonquins. In what sense was what happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Atlantic basin a barbarian invasion? Was the U.S. acquisition of Texas a case of elite transfer? I think the answers to these questions is superficially yes, though I suspect Heather and others would qualify and texture them. In any event, the overall paradigm here is a deeply resonant one. Heather can't claim all the credit for that -- his interdisciplinary approach to his subject is clearly shared and part of a lively scholarly literature -- but the breadth, depth and brio of Empires and Barbarians is a significant accomplishment and a welcome gateway for the curious as well as the deeply informed.

Da bomb on The Crater

In Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder, Kevin Levin captures 150 years of race relations through the prism of a Civil War engagement

The following has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network site.    


Kevin Levin is quietly reinventing the historical profession. This quest is particularly intriguing because he lacks a Ph.D. (he holds a master's degree in History from the University of Richmond), has never taught a college course at more than an adjunct level, and recently left his teaching position at St. Anne's-Belfield, a boarding school in Charlottesville, Virginia. One thing Levin does have, however, is a blog. Of course, so do a lot of people. But Levin's blog, Civil War Memory, is exceptional in its technological savvy, ability to attract advertisers, and the prodigious quantity of content he generates for it.

Of course, none of that would matter if Civil War Memory wasn't interesting. But it is, deeply so. Levin writes gracefully and with real insight about race relations, the academic/public divide, and often fiercely contested questions of collective memory, in arenas that range from battlefield sites to popular culture. He's got over a thousand regular followers, and gets almost 50,000 page views a month. Actually, Levin does what what a successful academic scholar is supposed to do: participate in -- and enlarge -- intellectual conversation by drawing on recent research. This was the noble dream at the heart of the creation of the modern university system, but one that has been fitfully realized at best.

People are starting to take notice of Levin. His coverage of a dispute between scholars over their respective books on Mississippi's Jones County during the Civil War got the attention of the New York Times, and Levin's work has since appeared there as well as in publications like The Atlantic.  He typically has a few speaking engagements a month, which in recent months have included talks at the OAH and at Yale. It's a little unclear how, or whether, he's actually making a living from all this, but his editorial work ethic has clearly been paying at least some dividends, figurative or otherwise. Given the contraction in the historical profession, it's hard not to believe what he's doing will become some form of the norm for anyone who wants to make it in this business. Years from now people will say he showed the way.

This context seems worth reviewing as a prelude to discussing Levin's first book, Remembering the Crater, which has just been published as part of the University of Kentucky's "New Directions in Southern History" series. One of the more surprising aspects of this good piece of scholarship is how traditional it is, a brief monograph of the kind you expect from a recent Ph.D. staking a historiographic claim he hopes will land the brass ring of an assistant professorship. The notes section registers the requisite list of visits to archives, the notes are rich in primary and secondary sources, and the blurbs come from scholarly heavyweights in Middle Period history like David Blight and Earl Hess. The book effectively ratifies Levin as a switch hitter, a guy who can hold his weight with the old guard even as he pushes out on an electronic frontier. This is high praise (with a few reservations I'll get to shortly).

Levin positions himself squarely in the sub-field of memory, a specialty that emerged about two decades ago, and one in which the Civil War has been a particularly fruitful frame of reference. The point of departure here is Battle of the Crater, which took place on July 30, 1864. The engagement, part of a rotating wheel of struggle between Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in 1864-65 for control of Richmond, began as an attempt by the part of the Union army to break the impasse by seizing control of Petersburg, the rail lifeline to the capital of the Confederacy. When an initial attempt to use stealth failed, Federal engineers developed a plan that involved tunneling under Rebel lines, planting thousands of pounds of explosives, and exploiting the confusion that would follow exploding them by sending an offensive to break Southern defenses. A key part of the plan involved using specially trained forces of the United States Colored Troops (USCT), a fraught tactical decision given the racial dimension of the war and recent atrocities against black soldiers by Confederates at Fort Pillow, Arkansas earlier in 1864. Such factors and the racial prejudices against African Americans among Union officers (as well as concern they would be cannon fodder) led to a change of plan that resulted in the USCT participating, but not leading, the assault. It proved to be a debacle -- the last real Confederate victory in the war. Levin rehearses the military background of the battle skillfully. He does a particularly nice job in his attentiveness to the Petersburg landscape, which puts him on the cutting edge of recent Civil War scholarship.

His real interest, however, is less the battle than the way it has been remembered by subsequent generations in Virginia and elsewhere. At first, the need to avoid antagonizing the victorious federal government led to relatively discreet memorials that acknowledged, if minimized, a black role. But the end of the Reconstruction era brought with it increasingly insistent affirmations of the Lost Cause and an attendant desire to erase African Americans from collective memory, one particularly evident in the 1903 re-enactment of the battle, where black Union participants were entirely absent. (This was an event witnessed by a teenaged Douglas Southall Freeman, and an inspiration for his famous multi-volume biography of Lee.)

Yet such an erasure was not always as easy as one might think. Levin pays particular attention to the career of Brigadier General William Mahone, who led the successful counterattack at the Crater.  He later went on to play a major role in postwar Virginia politics, where he collaborated with northern Republicans and Virginia African Americans to fashion a relatively progressive program that supported state-funded public schools, for example. Mahone's military credentials made it difficult for his critics to assault his credibility, but that didn't stop them from trying -- and ultimately succeeding.

Eventually, however, the long night of Jim Crow was followed by the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. Media coverage of the struggle for equality peaked during the Civil War centennial, complicating the efforts of segregationists and Civil War traditionalists (who of course were often the same people) and gradually bringing about a more inclusive vision of the war. That sense of inclusiveness involved not only reintegrating the USCT into the story of the Crater and the Civil War generally, but also widening the focus of battlefield study to include more social and cultural history. 

In its broadest outlines, this is a familiar story. As Levin acknowledges, it fits squarely in the paradigm of the reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist phases of post-Civil War history traced by David Blight in his landmark 2001 book Race and Reunion. Levin asserts that Blight "does not go far enough in explaining the interplay of race and politics in national reconciliation as well as the deep divisions between former Confederates and white Virginians." Certainly Levin explores some intriguing nuances here; Mahone's career in particular stands out in this regard. But the outcome of the story is plain (and, in the wider context of Southern history, predictable) enough.

One also wonders about the next turn of the wheel. Like most historians of the last half-century, Levin renders this story as one of Progress. There was what really happened, then it got hidden by a bunch of racists, and now the truth has reemerged. Without denying the salutary consequences of writing African Americans back into history -- or endorsing the mindless dead-ender insistence on "heritage," whose advocates never seem to spell out just what they're affirming a heritage of -- one wonders if the story is this simple.  What are we in the process of forgetting these days? How can such absences be traced? Where might the story go from here? These are difficult questions, and it may be unfair to expect Levin to grapple with them. Perhaps he gets credit for doing so much so well that he provokes them.

A final critique: the subtitle of this book is "war as murder." Yes, the (racial) ferocity of the battle, and the summary executions that followed, make it different than other battles of the Civil War, or other battles in U.S. history generally. And the attempt to forget these atrocities are an essential part of the story. But Levin's larger point is less about the racial violence per se than how an event is remembered and gets used for later partisan and/or ideological purposes. It's not so much war as murder as it is war as palimpsest (though "palimpsest" is probably not a great word for the cover of a book for anyone but Gore Vidal).

In any event, Remembering the Battle of the Crater is itself a document of a profession in transition. Faithful in his fidelity to traditional scholarship, Levin a particularly credible and engaging vessel for taking it into the 21st century. Long may he wave.