A genuine take on U.S. history

The Genuine Article

A Historian Looks at Early America

Edmund S. Morgan

W.W. Norton: 316 pp., $26.95

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“Patriotism is so often a disguise that the genuine article is always surprising,” Edmund S. Morgan writes in his new book of essays drawn from articles that have appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Morgan’s genuine article in this case is George Washington, a man so universally and extravagantly admired in his time, and so elusive to modern sensibilities. Washington was, the eminent historian says, “a man of ordinary talents.” He did not have the brilliance or intellectual acumen of Franklin, Jefferson or Madison.

But he had, first of all, an impressiveness of body and carriage that struck anyone who saw him. He was tall, grave and as Jefferson said, “the best horseman of his age.”

He was, in Morgan’s words, “in conscious pursuit of honor and power by means of deserving honor and power.... [H]e got them and deserved them by identifying himself wholly with the people who conferred them.”

Washington was also, Morgan says, a writer of “consistent force and clarity” that was “the expression of a single mind.” “It was not,” Morgan says, “the mind of an intellectual. But it was a mind whose simple power was reflected in his every move.”

To read Washington’s published papers, Morgan argues, is to have no doubt as to why many consider him the founding father.

This sketch of Washington in “The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America,” which first appeared in Morgan’s 1996 review of Richard Brook- hiser’s “Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington,” is emblematic of Morgan’s approach and style. He is steady and fair. He chides Brookhiser in the essay for having “previously squandered his talents in a jeremiad for the demise of WASP hegemony,” but writes that in the first president, Brookhiser “found a subject more worthy of those talents, which are considerable.”

Morgan, an emeritus professor of history at Yale, describes himself as a member of that post-World War II generation of historians (of which Harvard’s Bernard Bailyn is another prominent member) who took seriously the words of the founding fathers and their Colonial predecessors. In so doing they diverged from the attitude of their Marxist and semi-Marxist predecessors such as Charles Beard, who saw in the movements of history the guiding hand of economic interests, regardless of how the principal actors described themselves and their actions.

Morgan’s essays provide a good overview of the trends and changes in the writing of U.S. history, from the earliest days after the Revolution, when it was enough for historians to praise Americans for resisting British tyranny, to the contemporary taste for emphasizing the previously neglected roles of gender, race and popular culture.

Morgan finds that the New Left historians have generally overemphasized the importance of popular insurrections in U.S. history. (He says their theories have stumbled over the facts.) But he is respectful of new studies that have, for instance, paid more attention to the accomplishments of blacks during Reconstruction and to the role of women throughout history.

He is also receptive to the new and more informal use of language in historical studies. Reviewing the 14-volume American National Biography, a contemporary companion to the older, 20-volume Dictionary of National Biography, Morgan writes approvingly of the entry that says that Pat Garrett, the New Mexico sheriff who shot Billy the Kid, was not the blackhearted villain of legend but “a cool-headed, reflective lawman who kept his gun in his pants.” In earlier times, Morgan says, some editor would have changed that colloquial and forceful expression to something like “was loath to resort to firearms.”

In these essays, Morgan ranges widely over aspects and characters in Colonial and Revolutionary history. His own first specialty was Puritan studies, under Harvard scholar Perry Miller; he writes that John Winthrop was “the first great American” for his prudence in guiding the Massachusetts Bay Colony after its founding by Puritans in 1630.

He writes about Benjamin Franklin, of whom he published a fine biography in 2002; about the Colonial Virginians, so much less introspective than the New Englanders, whose self-examinations have left a strong imprint upon the American mind; and about new investigations of slavery, which he labels “The Big American Crime.”

Throughout, he is both respectful of facts and open-minded about their interpretation. In a time when some historians are reaching back to the past to make noisily their various ideological cases in the present, Morgan can be called -- and this is meant as praise -- the quiet historian.