Edmund S. Morgan (1916–2013)

American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America (W.W. Norton, 2009) is leading historian Edmund S. Morgan's new collection of (mostly) previously-published essays. Of his choices for inclusion, he writes "The people I have selected here, whether public heroes or simply my own favorites, have all surprised me in one way or another. Something about them has sent me looking at the records they left behind, often looking for a second time, having second thoughts" (p. xiii). show more He adds that he sees many of his characters as heroes or heroines by virtue of an "ability to say no ... in resistance to what society or its custodians demanded of them" (p. xiv).

The book, drawn as it is from very disparate essays, seems a bit of a hodgepodge. A chapter on Christopher Columbus which focuses on the clash of cultures and motives between the "conquerors" and the native Caribbean islanders they encountered is followed by a (wonderful) piece on the Yale College library and its power to shape young minds (more on this below). In "The Unyielding Indian" Morgan pays homage to the native people of North America for their resistance to European "absorption" and their high valuation of individual freedom ("we see in him what we might be if we carried some of our avowed principles to their logical conclusion", p. 53).

In a pair of essays both originally published in 1942, Morgan examines the stereotype as Puritans as sexless prudes (and finds it misses the point, as later works have continued to show), and delves into one of the most fascinating legal battles of 17th-century Boston, the long feud between heiress Anne Keayne and her impotent, money-grubbing, sometime-husband Edward Lane. He profiles Anne Hutchinson and Michael Wigglesworth ("the puritan's puritan"), and declares his admiration for Salem witchcraft players Giles Corey and Mary Easty.

Two pieces compare Yale presidents Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, and Ben Franklin and George Washington, and Morgan delves further into Franklin's pragmatic streak in a separate essay. In the final two chapters, he examines the "fiction" of representation as a political reality, and discusses the vital role of the Antifederalists in the creation of the American government as we know it. Finally, he closes the book with an appreciation of his own teacher, Perry Miller.

All of these essays are written with the clarity and strength of composition which have made Morgan's works so accessible and interesting over the course of his long career (his first book was published in 1952; the first essay included here is from 1937). He can turn a phrase, and sometimes even gets off an excellent joke in the process (in the essay on Salem, he says of Cotton Mather's pre-Salem 'victory' over the devil in the case of a possessed girl "he could not refrain from from giving way to his most conspicuous weakness: he had to write a book about it", p. 118). His sense of irony never fails, and it is remarkable how timely these essays remain even though many of them first saw print more than a half-century ago (although I have not compared them to the original versions to see if they have been heavily edited for re-publication here).

For reasons obvious to those who know me, I was most taken by Morgan's chapter on the early library at Yale ("Dangerous Books," from 1959). He waxes poetic on libraries here, calling them "the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work" (p. 24). He concludes the essay thus: "While libraries exist, where students and scholars can go to the original sources and discover the facts for themselves, all efforts at control will be futile ... I hope your library and mine will continue to be dangerous for many years to come" (p. 38). Hear hear!

My one quibble with this volume is that I would have liked to see the original publication information for the essays at the beginning (it is, instead, on the back of the title page in tiny print, with only the date at the end of each essay). Other than that minor detail, it was a delight.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/06/book-review-american-heroes.html show less

In this biographical sketch, the author -- a noted historian of the American Revolution -- expresses his admiration for this remarkable figure. A generation older than other leading Founding Fathers, Franklin had already earned enough to retire from business and devote himself to public service while Washington was a teenager and Jefferson a child. The international renown he achieved through his scientific experiments was of inestimable value when he went to France during the Revolution to show more plead America’s case in its quest for independence, but even more valuable in Morgan’s estimation was his integrity and winning personality.
Morgan does not gloss over Franklin’s blunders, the chief of which his feud with Thomas Penn, proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony. This son of William, colony founder, displayed all the faults of an absentee landlord, which seems to have violated Franklin’s sense of right and wrong to such an extent that he departed from the pragmatism and far-sightedness that normally governed his conduct. Yet the moribund government that resulted from Penn’s neglect was the environment in which Franklin practiced his growing skill at organizing private schemes for the public good such as a fire department and a library. It was characteristic of the man, and a key to his success, that he never appeared to lead, but let others take the initiative and even the credit in projects he organized. Those in the know saw through this, of course, and esteemed him the more for it. Ironically, this led the British to suspect that Franklin, in the long years he spent in London as agent of the colonies, was the ringleader of the growing rebellion. They were wrong, but not by much.
Franklin’s own vision of America as a partner in a transatlantic empire, in time, the dominant partner, was frustrated in his lifetime, primarily because a succession of British governments were led by men who lacked the imagination to share it (others, such as William Pitt, did grasp it, but were no longer in power). Franklin’s hope was eventually realized nevertheless in the special relationship between the two English-speaking powers through most of the 20th century.
Few people born three centuries ago are as accessible as he. Morgan based his research primarily on Franklin's own writings, which fill 46 volumes in the critical edition. At the same time, he stresses that there is always something Franklin seems to be withholding.
Morgan tells the tale well and has succeeded in his goal of presenting Franklin as an appealing personality. Some other figures, such as John Adams, who is seen through the prism of his own overweening vanity and faulted for claiming to one and all he could have done a better job negotiating with both the French and English, come off more poorly. I would have liked more of an exploration of the origins of Franklin's insatiably curious mind and astounding physical energy, but Morgan avoids the pitfalls of psycho-biography.
This is not a detailed biography, but a good first introduction to this giant of a man whose vitality, optimism and gregarious nature were emblematic of the new nation taking shape on the Western shore of the Atlantic. Highly recommended. show less

I first read Edmund Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma over twenty-five years ago, and I remember at that time thinking it a dull and uninteresting book that I suffered through rather than enjoyed. Recently, though, I came across a copy in a thrift store, and seeing it inspired me to revisit it and reassess my prior conclusion. It didn’t take me along to feel ashamed for the callowness of my youthful judgment. The more I read the more impressed I was by Morgan’s penetrating assessments of show more his subject and his clever turns of phrase.

The John Winthrop of Morgan’s book is a man who struggled his entire life with the challenge imposed by his faith to exercise restraint in a world besmirched by sin. The son of Suffolk gentry, Winthrop grew up in a world of privilege. As a young man, he embraced Puritanism and was soon engaged with the problem of living a godly life amidst temptation. Morgan provides a nicely nuanced summary of Puritan beliefs, making it clear that it was not a faith of humorless scolds but one that accepted the pleasures of the world and encouraged their enjoyment in moderation. The Puritans’ opposition to the Catholic influences in the Church of England increasingly put them odds with the Stuart monarchs, however, leading many to seek an alternative.

The alternative they found was resettlement in the New World. As a prosperous landowner and legal official Winthrop was a natural choice to spearhead their efforts to establish a colony in New England, and he was among the initial shipload of passengers who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the spring of 1630 to make a new home in the region. While Morgan provides an effective account of the tribulations of the early settlement, his main focus is on the governance of the colony, in which Winthrop played a major part. He characterizes his subject’s approach to government as a form of loose despotism, in which Winthrop and the other councilors of the Massachusetts Bay colony exercised a near-total dominance over the colony. As the newly elected governor, the burden fell on Winthrop’s shoulders, and Morgan provides a laudatory description of his achievements.

Morgan notes that Winthrop’s main challenge was in building not just a successful colony, but one that reflected Puritan values. While the colonists were expected to police the sin in their communities, Winthrop faced as well the possibility of a schism, which he went to considerable lengths to deter. Morgan paints this as a challenge similar to the one Winthrop dealt with in his personal life: that of striking a balance, in this case between liberal acceptance on one side and separatism on the other. It was in navigating this path that Winthrop dealt with the most famous controversies of his career, including those of the ultra-separatist Roger Williams and the trial of Anne Hutchinson. It was Winthrop’s light touch on many of these matters which opened him up to criticism from some of the more ambitious members of the colonial leadership, leading to periods out of governorship though never completely out of power.

Morgan relates all of this in a work that wears its erudition lightly. Though a short book, it benefits enormously from Morgan’s use of Winthrop’s papers and other contemporary sources. His explanation of the doctrinal disputes is admirably clear, and while his focus on colonial government and politics can sometimes bog down in the details it’s never irrelevant or uninformative. Despite its age, his book remains a valuable short biography of Winthrop and an effective introduction to the early years of the Massachusetts Bay colony. I’m just disappointed that it took me as long as it did to appreciate its core value and its many subtle charms. show less

In my estimation, Edmund Morgan is one of the finest American historians of his or any other generation and I have read a number of his earlier books. Morgan is now 93 years old, so I was surprised to see a new book from him on the shelves. And of course, it turns out that the book is a collection of essays written over the past many years. Most of the pieces have been previously published. So, now you are forewarned. How much that matters depends in part on how much you enjoy reading Edmund show more Morgan, that rarest of birds, an academic historian who can tell a good story elegantly and simply, but not simplistically.

Many of the essays trace familiar ground from Morgan’s works on early America. For example, his elucidation of the Puritans as more complicated and interesting than you probably think is familiar to readers of [[ASIN:0321478061 The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Library of American Biography)]]. Likewise, his views on James Madison’s invention of the American people and thus created an American popular sovereignty that were developed in [[ASIN:0393306232 Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America]].

His essay Dangerous Books, while it may be familiar to a few readers of [[ASIN:0393301265 Gentle Puritan]] (judging by the absence of any ratings or reviews I’m guessing that number is very small), was new to me and worth the price of admission by itself. Morgan uses the life of Ezra Stiles at Yale (first as student, later as president) to extol the importance of libraries – and their danger to entrenched belief. Morgan’s easy and elegant writing is on display: “It was probably inevitable that Ezra Stiles, placed in reach of the Yale Library, would sooner or later arrive at a number of heretical ideas." Stiles "read himself to the edge of deism with Shaftesbury and then tried to read himself back again...It might seem therefore that Ezra Stiles fully recovered from his bout with the library.” But Stiles believed that truth would prevail when it came "forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an equal Footing….only tyrants need fear the truth."

Morgan concludes, "Ezra Stiles was, as you can see, a dangerous man. But the danger lay less in his own radical views than in the freedom he wanted for others, the freedom to read and from reading to think and speak the thoughts that dissolve old institutions and create new ones. That kind of freedom is as dangerous today [1959] as it was then. If we allow young men and women to read and think, we must expect that their thoughts will not be our thoughts and that they will violate much that we hold dear….The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it."

While I felt a bit flimflammed by the book’s cover that strongly implied the book contained new material, it is hard to complain when the result is reading a collection of essays on early Americans by Edmund Morgan. 4.5 stars. Highly recommended. show less