Sydney Williams :Burrowing into Books – “Illuminating History,” by Bernard Bailyn
When reading about early American history, one is struck by the contrast between the fierce independence, intellect and common sense of those who migrated across the Atlantic to these, then, unknown shores, and the fearful, unquestioning subservience of their descendants. Can a people in a country whose culture has so changed provide the same opportunities for their descendants as our ancestors did for us?
This short book (246 pages), includes a seventeen-page introduction, forty-one-page epilogue and appendix, and five chapters. It is a chronology of Professor Bailyn’s academic life, from his thesis on Tristram Shandy at Williams College in 1943 to a seminar at Harvard, “Justice: Europe in America, 1500-1830,” in 2010. History interested him, he tells us, as he wanted to explore the “connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.” “I discovered…within the plentiful data, [that] one or more obscure documents or individuals…illuminated the greater picture.” Bailyn’s specialty is the American Revolution and events leading to it: “the pivot on which the whole of American history and much of Western civilization turned.”
In the first chapter, “Keayne’s Will,” he explores colonial Boston. He takes the reader through the Will of Robert Keayne (1595-1656), in which Keayne reconciles his success as a Boston immigrant merchant with his belief in a harsh Puritan God. The Will was written over several years and provides clues to the man and the time. As Bailyn writes, “…he made clear the high tension that had always existed between his success in his ‘calling’ and the constraints on the spirit that had inspired it.”
In Chapter two, using census data, Bailyn explores family and home life in England and in British North America. “In that era a transformation had taken place in the form of education, the key to which lay not in formal schooling but in the history of family life, the primal core of education, and also the community and the church.” We travel to the English village of Nottinghamshire to look at families, their size and mobility. He deduces that the impact of the Industrial Revolution had not been “as radical as had been presumed.” We return to Massachusetts and the towns of Plymouth, Dedham and Andover. Among discoveries was that the average age at death for the twenty-nine male founders of Andover was 71.8. For the women, it was 70.8.
“Harbottle’s Index” heads the third chapter. Harbottle Dorr was a Boston shopkeeper who collected and indexed newspapers in the decade before the Revolutionary War, providing researchers an invaluable source. As well, Bailyn quotes from half a dozen news articles written before the Revolution by a preacher from Lyme (now Old Lyme), Connecticut, Stephen Johnson, who stressed that the gripe with England was not with the King, “but [with] Parliament and the late British ministry and their tools and hangers-on in England and America,” those whom today would be called bureaucrats. Using town records regarding acceptance of the Massachusetts State Constitution, especially those from Petersham, Bailyn gains a sense of people’s feeling toward self-government. As for the people of Petersham, their “commentary was unique in the breadth of its coverage, in its analytical acuity and in its extraordinary devotion to protecting every shred of the individual’s freedom against the powers of constituted authority.”
The fourth chapter is about “the charismatic, God-possessed Johann Conrad Beissel” Beissel was born in south western Germany in 1691 and emigrated to America around 1730. Two years later he created the Ephrata cloister, dedicated to celibacy, religion and music. It was located in what is now the borough of Ephrata, fifty-seven miles north west of Philadelphia. It was in music that the untrained Beissel “found his greatest spiritual satisfaction.” His mentee (and later friend of Benjamin Franklin), Peter Miller wrote of Beissel’s adopted Country, which had granted him liberty of conscience, after he had been driven out of his fatherland: it will “always be blessed and be a nursery of God…”
In the final chapter, Professor Bailyn uses the family of Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, to shed light on the networks created by transatlantic trade. He writes of how they became a model of what “…would become, a century later, the vast latticework of economic, political, and cultural entanglements that spanned the four continents of the Atlantic world.” Between 1996 and 2010, Bailyn created a series of annual seminars to address connections between the four continents facing the Atlantic: “It was a world in motion, its populations shifting, large groups reorganizing their communal life in new and strange circumstances.”
In the epilogue, Bailyn writes of philosophical difficulties facing historians: “The past is a different world, and we seek to understand it as it was.” But, “we cannot divest ourselves of our own assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and experiences – strip away everything that intervened between now and then…” He suggests that historic fiction, when well done, can provide a reliable historical framework.
Tributes to his two PhD advisors, Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) and Oscar Handlin (1915-2011), comprise the appendix. While both shared a passion for history, they differed in backgrounds and approach to its study.
The word “Illuminating” in the title is fitting, for the story he tells sheds light, not only on the scholarship that interests him, but also on his seven decades of academic life. It is a fascinating read.
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