David Hackett Fischer

This book is not for the anti-racist.

While the author seems to highlight the ways America benefited from the influences of its enslaved population (which I do believe is true), I do not trust his base ideals - that American values of liberty and freedom have triumphed over tyranny and slavery. It would be disingenuous at best to study slavery in America without connecting slavery and white supremacy to the continual oppression of minorities by white Americans, and that’s what this book show more does. The author gives a timeline that would seem to eradicate slavery and the oppression of black Americans from the prohibition of the foreign slave trade in 1808 to the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 which grants all citizens “equal protections of the laws” with no distinctions of race.

What is not mentioned is how the years after slavery was abolished in 1865 saw many institutions and laws established to perpetuate oppression or how black people in this country are still subjected to different treatment under the law, despite the inclusive wording of those amendments. Let no one forget that it’s still legal to use prisoners for slave labor, and the system is set up to disproportionately incarcerate people of color. Liberty and freedom are nominal values at best for minorities in this country, and the author is openly critical of any attempt to view American history in a way that he calls “deeply negative” - giving more attention to slavery, racism, inequality, injustice, and corruption. He also calls the demand for political correctness a “hostile assault” on the ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth previously used in historical research and says that not only has public discourse in the twenty-first century seen a growing disregard for truth but that the new rhetoric is suffering from deliberate falsehoods. Ironically, I agree with that somewhat, but in literally the opposite way than what he meant.

Calling out America’s history of institutionalized racism and white supremacy is not a disregard for truth. It is a call for previously hidden or ignored truths to be brought into the open.

I am just perplexed by this book. It openly admits that most of America’s enslaved people were taken directly from their own homeland and acknowledges that those enslaved people suffered extreme cruelty and abuse that, thanks to more research and empirical evidence, was even worse than many historians previously thought. And yet the overall tone of the work is positive towards America as an institution. He proves that white slave owners were horrifically savage, admits to the atrocities forced upon black people both born in Africa and born in America, and then speaks derisively of the way many Americans view our history negatively in the twenty-first century, particularly in the years he wrote this book (2020 and 2021). Hmm…what movements around that time could possibly have contributed to the author’s disdain of “political correctness” and “negative” views on American history? This guy praises empirical evidence in historical research and then acts like we should ignore all the ways in which America has never really been about liberty and freedom for ALL.

My initial reaction to the book was full of red flags. White author show less

What I particularly enjoy about David Hackett Fischer’s books is that he is a practitioner of what I like to call “thick history”. On the one hand, he is a throwback to older generations of historians who wrote history as the acts of remarkable individuals – heroes. The Samuel de Champlain who emerges from the pages of this book is definitely that. At the same time, Fischer is informed by the broad range of developments in the practice and writing of history that emerged during the show more course of the twentieth century: the new social history, ethnography, economic history, and so on. Whatever his topic, he has an eye for the role of folkways, of speech patterns, and styles of architecture in recovering the past. On top of this, he is unabashed in his devotion to what some feel is an irreconcilable pair of opposites, “the study of the past on its own terms and at the same time [to] link it with the present” (p. 567).
The “dream” at the core of this book is Champlain’s humanistic vision of a world of tolerance and cooperation in the North American forest, as different as possible from the world of cruelty and religious intolerance into which he was born in France. An early assignment as an intelligence agent (= “spy”) in New Spain showed him one possible way of dealing with the native populations of the western hemisphere, and it appalled him. From his first voyage along the St. Lawrence River, his approach was unusual. He was vitally interested in the native population. While there were aspects of their lives that met with his disapproval, there was much more that he found to admire. In return, the natives experienced in Champlain a man unlike many of those they would encounter: a man who listened, who sought to understand, and one who kept his word. He was not the only one, but there were too few like him.
There is a sense of tragedy in the account, not only in the tale of a man whose devotion to his goal and his manifold skills in pursuing it enabled him to overcome many obstacles and reversals, both in the New World and back home in the Old. More than that, there is the sense of a missed opportunity, a sense that Champlain’s dream died with him. Yet this reader was left wondering what chance the dream had of fulfilment. Champlain avoided violence against the native inhabitants, certainly laudable, yet the diseases carried by the settlers he imported proved as deadly as any weapons he could have wielded. He had the fortune of dying of a stroke before epidemics ravaged the Huron nation. What were the real prospects for the achievement of his dream, even had his masters back home, Louis XIII and Richelieu, subscribed to it? Of course we cannot know. Nevertheless it remains incontestable that Champlain accomplished much; more important than the amount of his achievement or its permanence, however, was the way he achieved what he did. The age in which he lived would have made it easier for him to act very differently than he did – less honorably, less peaceably, less tolerantly. What I felt ennobling in reading this book was that, by doing things in the way he did, Champlain met with more success than those who employed more conventional methods.
Symptomatic of the thoroughness of Fischer’s approach is a section he wedges between the final chapter of his text and the sixteen appendices that follow, entitled Memories of Champlain. In it, he surveys the historiography of Champlain over four centuries. He shows a virtuostic mastery of the material; more than that, a magnanimous spirit that values the achievement of various schools and tendencies, even those with which he disagrees. In this way, Fischer is not unlike Champlain.
Highly recommended. show less

David Hackett Fischer's latest great thick book is Champlain's Dream (Simon & Schuster, 2008), not only a full-scale biography of French explorer and colonial advocate Samuel de Champlain but also a detailed history of the first few decades of French settlement in North America, and even quite a bit more besides.

In the first 530 pages of this book, Fischer tells us Champlain's story from beginning to end, starting with a fascinating chapter on his natal region in the middle part of France's show more west coast during the mid-sixteenth century and proceeding through Champlain's long life as a tireless promoter of French activities in North America. There is much here that I didn't know of Champlain before, including that he made a semi-surreptitious trip to New Spain (1599-1601), that he explored the waters of midcoast Maine as far south as today's Bath (1605), and that he made twenty-seven Atlantic crossings in thirty-seven years (unlike our friend Hakluyt, England's tireless promoter of colonialism, Champlain actually practiced what he preached - no offense intended to Mr. Hakluyt of course).

Fischer is kind to Champlain, but it almost seems like it would be a stretch not to be. The man worked tirelessly to promote French expansionism, but he also worked at very turn to foster and maintain good relations with the Indian tribes of the St. Lawrence valley and beyond (he railed against mistreatment of the native peoples by his fellow European, French or otherwise, and while he did make war against hostile tribes, Fischer argues he did so at the behest of his allies in the interest of bringing about a wider peace - a policy which was quite successful for several decades). Unlike so many colonialists of the period, Champlain diligently studied what had been done before and sought to correct his predecessors' mistakes, so his colonies typically did not suffer the kinds of catastrophic collapses and high mortality rates experienced at other early settlements.

Champlain's political and business dealings in France are also covered in a detailed but integrated fashion, as Fischer guides the reader through the difficult and tumultuous waters of France under Henry IV, Marie de Medici, and Louis XIII. Every time poor Champlain got things going right in Canada, he'd get back to France and find everything on its head - and yet somehow he always managed to set it all to rights again. By the end of his life, a major population explosion had begun in Canada as more families began to emigrate to the settlements and begin to create a culture there.

As is his wont (see his earlier book Albion's Seed), Fischer supplies a chapter on Canadian folkways, examining the dialects, architectures and other aspects of early Québécois and Acadian cultures based on the French regional origins of their residents.

Following the main narrative Fischer has tacked on a whole bunch of interesting bits, all printed in very tiny type. A thirty-five page historiographical essay examines the ups and downs (and now ups again) of Champlain's reputation as recorded by historians (American, European and Canadian), while shorter essays examine certain unresolved questions about Champlain's life and works, including his birthdate, the accuracy of some of his writings, &c.). Finally, other appendices provide useful background, including a chronology of Champlain's travels, short sketches of his superiors and an examination of the Indian nations he dealt with, plus data on the ships, guns, terms of measurement, money and calendars mentioned in the text. And then there are the 110 pages of densely-packed notes, followed by the forty-plus page bibliography, rich with interesting goodies. If it weren't so interesting, it might all seem a bit much - but it works.

A fine book, and almost certainly the biography of Champlain at least for our lifetimes.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2008/11/book-review-champlains-dream.html show less

I loved this book. The writing is easy to read and not too dense, unlike some histories. Fischer starts out giving us a good deal of background information that helps us to better understand the events that will follow. Some readers might get bored at this point, but I did not, and I found the information helpful. Fischer describes the make-up of all the armies involved: American, British, and Hessian, as well as their uniforms and weaponry.

Fischer starts the meat of the book with the show more campaign plans for both sides and the battle in New York. By this time, I am very familiar with that battle, but it's necessary to understand it in order to understand the situation leading to the famous crossing. What I really appreciated was Fischer's detailed description of the American army's retreat across New Jersey, because that normally seems to take only a few sentences in most histories, and what happened then has been rather fuzzy to me. Fischer also talks about the behavior of the British in New Jersey. The army took grain and livestock from the farmers to feed their soldiers. But their behavior was extremely boorish, and many took to plundering and even rape, even though this was against the rules the army was supposed to follow. Of course, this inspired groups of civilians to begin to oppose the British occupation, and they began to harass the British. All of this was new to me.

Fischer thoroughly describes Washington's crossing of the Delaware and the attack on Trenton. He debunks the reports that the Hessians were drunk and unprepared. He also tells us about planned simultaneous attacks on a couple of other locations that fell apart. Did you know there was a second battle of Trenton? Fischer gives as full a recounting of that battle as he did the first one. This was apparently a very important encounter during the Revolution, and has mostly been overlooked by history. One participant "always remembered the stand at Assunpink as the critical moment of the war." This is immediately followed by the attack at Princeton, which is given another full account here. I've read about that battle before but again, not in the detail we get here. Fischer concludes with an analysis of what this campaign meant to the Revolution. He asserts that "the battles at Trenton and Princeton and the Forage War were not small symbolic victories, as many historians have regarded them. The winter campaign inflicted severe damage on British and Hessian forces."

Washington's Crossing gives a clear picture of what happened during the initial campaigns of the Revolution. Fischer includes a large number of footnotes, appendices, and an extensive bibliography, evidence of the research that went into the book. There's also a Historiography discussing interpretations of The Crossing from many viewpoints over time. Overall, the book provides excellent coverage of the entire campaign. This is the way history should be written. show less