American Heroes

Preface

PART ONE: THE CONQUERORS

Chapter One
T
HE
C
ONQUERORS

PART TWO: PURITANS, WITCHES, AND QUAKERS

Chapter Two
D
ANGEROUS
B
OOKS

Chapter Three
T
HE
U
NYIELDING
I
NDIAN

Chapter Four
J
OHN
W
INTHROP'S
V
ISION

Chapter Five
T
HE
P
URITANS AND
S
EX

Chapter Six
T
HE
P
ROBLEMS OF A
P
URITAN
H
EIRESS

Chapter Seven
T
HE
C
ASE AGAINST
A
NNE
H
UTCHINSON

Chapter Eight
T
HE
P
URITAN'S
P
URITAN
: M
ICHAEL
W
IGGLESWORTH

Chapter Nine
T
HE
C
OURAGE OF
G
ILES
C
ORY AND
M
ARY
E
ASTY

Chapter Ten
P
OSTSCRIPT:
P
HILADELPHIA
1787

Chapter Eleven
T
HE
C
ONTENTIOUS
Q
UAKER
: W
ILLIAM
P
ENN

Chapter Twelve
E
ZRA
S
TILES AND
T
IMOTHY
D
WIGHT

PART THREE: REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS

Chapter Thirteen
T
HE
P
OWER OF
N
EGATIVE
T
HINKING
: B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN AND
G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON

Chapter Fourteen
T
HE
E
ND OF
F
RANKLIN'S
P
RAGMATISM

Chapter Fifteen
T
HE
F
OUNDING
F
ATHERS'
P
ROBLEM
: R
EPRESENTATION

Chapter Sixteen
T
HE
R
OLE OF THE
A
NTIFEDERALISTS

Epilogue
T
HE
G
ENIUS OF
P
ERRY
M
ILLER

Acknowledgments

A
MERICAN HEROES.
Probably most of the people in this book would have disclaimed or disdained the title. Through most of the eighteenth century, while Americans remained colonists of Great Britain, the word carried its ancient meaning of great warrior, with connotations of membership among the gods or demigods who first bore the title in ancient Greece. Among the Puritans of New England it might have been thought sacrilegious to apply the word to any human being, least of all to some godlike warrior. As late as 1748 Benjamin Franklin, writing as Poor Richard, turned the tables on the word's implication of veneration for warriors. “There are three great destroyers of mankind,” he wrote in his almanac, “
Plague, Famine,
and
Hero
. Plague and Famine destroy your persons only, and leave your goods to your Heirs; but Hero, when he comes, takes life and goods together; his business and glory it is, to destroy man and the works of man….
Hero
, therefore, is the worst of the three.”

Franklin may have been engaged in one of his humorous sallies, playing with popular beliefs by upending them. But he was not insulting anyone his readers would have known. There were no great American warriors then. When Americans gained one in George Washington, he did not fit Franklin's description. Franklin was nevertheless second to none in admiration of him and had no trouble knowing whom the Marquis of Lafayette meant in 1779 when speaking of “the godlike American hero.” But no American since Washington has gained remotely comparable acclaim, and Washington's continuing preeminence among our heroes probably owes as much to his presidency as to his generalship. The heroes elevated to a place beside him as founding fathers, including Franklin himself, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams, were not warriors. Alexander Hamilton aspired to be one and played a minor role at Yorktown, but gained heroic status, if he has it, as secretary of the treasury.

Even before the Revolution, Americans found their heroes in men who had led contests that stopped short of battle: a John Hampden, who would not pay an unlawful tax in the 1630s, but not an Oliver Cromwell, who led a civil war in the same cause. In the 1760s Americans named many towns after heroes who had supported their cause only in parliamentary debate: Pittsburgh, Conway, Barre, Wilkes-Barre. When they became independent, they looked to their own past for heroes and found a collection of them in the “Pilgrim Fathers,” remembered for their religious faith and popularly depicted on a solemn walk to church. They celebrated William Penn as a peacemaker. And they began to discover their affinity for nameless heroes among themselves who went their own way against the grain, regardless of custom, convenience, or habits of deference to authority. Many were to be found among the people just then pulling up stakes to strike out over the mountains to Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio. They were the Americans who sassed their betters and got into trouble, the people for whom the Bill of Rights was written, people not generally recognized as heroes but heroes nevertheless. There was Samuel Maverick, appropriately named, who settled himself in happy solitude on Massachusetts Bay six years before the Puritans got there. When they arrived, he fled from their prayers to an island of his own. There were the two Boston carters, my personal favorites, who stood down the royal governor of Massachusetts on a wintry day in 1705. They were carrying a heavy load of wood on a narrow road, drifted with snow, when they encountered the governor coming from the opposite direction. Since they did not turn off the road to let the governor's coach pass, he leapt out and bade them give way. One of them then, according to the governor's own testimony, “answered boldly, without any other words, ‘I am as good flesh and blood as you; I will not give way, you may goe out of the way.'” When the governor then drew his sword and advanced to teach the man a lesson, the carter “layd hold on the governor and broke the sword in his hand,” a supreme gesture of contempt for authority and its might.

Historians have been studying such heroes and the people around them for two centuries, but I think they can still surprise us. 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. Many of these pieces are the result of second thoughts about what I had said earlier in biographies or biographical sketches.

An example. The Puritans of New England were so sure of their historic significance that they preserved with loving care the voluminous records of everything they did. After a number of years immersed in those records, I came up for air with a biography of a man who figures largely in them, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts. One important document was the transcript of a speech he delivered to his shipmates on the voyage to found the colony in 1630. In it he told them that they would be as a “city upon a hill.” The phrase has resounded through subsequent American history, appropriated by patriots and politicians for the whole United States as a special place in the eyes of God and of the entire world. Winthrop himself dwelt at length on the “special commission” God had given the settlers of Massachusetts, a commission that obliged them to be “knitt together in the work as one man.” In
The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop
, I focused on the speech in explicating the Puritans' view of their mission in the New World. I think I was right to do so. The Puritans certainly thought that they were up to something special. But many years after writing that biography, in reading accounts of earlier English voyages to the New World, I came across things that made me question whether Winthrop's speech was as special as I had supposed. I have explained why in the brief essay called “John Winthrop's Vision.”

Another example. After studying the extant writings of Benjamin Franklin, I had to write a biography of him, too. When you spend years with your head buried in a man's papers, you get a strong urge to tell others about him, especially when you have found him doing and thinking things that you admire. Some reviewers called my biography a tribute, and I guess it was. Franklin is truly my hero, and so is Washington, two men for whom my admiration never stops growing. Recently, while rereading some of Franklin's correspondence, I was impressed by the way he had continually to decline doing things that the public wanted him to do. There was a striking resemblance between the two men that I had not noticed before: they both knew when and why to say no. “The Power of Negative Thinking” tries to explain that characteristic. Another, “The End of Franklin's Pragmatism,” assesses more closely the situations where Franklin, famous for the practical intelligence he brought to public problems, would draw a line in the sand and say “no farther.”

Franklin, Washington, and Winthrop were heroes because of their leadership. The same is true of William Penn, who like Winthrop founded an American colony. He could not personally guide his colony as Winthrop guided his, but the contours of his life help to explain much of what happened there. Penn was another surprise to me when I began to study his collected writings and correspondence. I was used to Quakers who endured their sufferings stoically. This one was the son of an admiral and a friend of the royal family, someone who was not to be meddled with lightly. It was refreshing to observe his behavior when he was arrested in London for preaching in the streets. Instead of appealing to the “inner light,” he patronized the judges, lectured them on the law, and left the court with a sneer when sentenced to a term in Newgate Prison, where he knew he could not be kept for long. He was a strange sort of leader for a humble people. And he was able to provide a refuge for them when he collected a large parcel of America in payment for sums his father had lent the king.

Many of the other people celebrated here were heroes or heroines, at least for me, by virtue of the same ability to say no that I find in Washington and Franklin. But they said it, not from positions of leadership or command, but in resistance to what society or its custodians demanded of them. That is the point of the essay “Dangerous Books” and, in a different way, of the one that follows, “The Unyielding Indian.” The Antifederalists, who opposed ratification of the Constitution, provide another case in point. They deserve to be called heroes because their opposition led to the adoption of the first ten amendments of the Constitution, our Bill of Rights. But the fundamental source of their opposition, I believe, lay in a basically insoluble problem to which the Constitution offered what was not really a solution but a workable bypass. I have preceded the piece on the Antifederalists with one analyzing that problem, the problem of representing the people, in the traditional American sense of representation, in a national government. I hope that this will make the Antifederalist opposition more comprehensible and that it may have some resonance for the operation and meaning of our federal system today.

Several pieces deal with the Puritans and their descendants in the decades after Winthrop led them ashore. They were heroes for me because they had the courage of their convictions, but not all the essays deal with their heroism. One tries to rescue them from the cartoonish prudishness of their “historical” image. Following it is the story of a Puritan heiress that exemplifies their frank recognition of the role of sex in the validation of marriage. My essay on Michael Wigglesworth suggests that the caricature may not be all wrong, but tries to clarify the patterns of thought behind their seemingly killjoy behavior.

The Salem witch trials are doubtless the most infamous episode of Puritan history. I have tried to explain here how the trials happened and how they produced a hero and heroine, both Puritan, who had the courage to say no at the cost of their lives. And because witch trials have had their counterpart in later American history, I have offered the aftermath of Salem in Massachusetts as a challenge to our complacency and complicity in the witch hunts and judicial murders of later days.

That two Puritans had the courage to defy other Puritans should not surprise us. Taking a stand on matters of principle was a Puritan trademark. But the force of popular belief in witchcraft and its powers, after the laws ceased to recognize it, did surprise this historian. The eighteenth century was the century of the Enlightenment, when (we are told) reason triumphed over superstition, when the natural displaced the supernatural, when the rights of the people threatened the thrones of kings. To the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the creation of the American republic embodied the application of reason to politics. And the greatest exemplar of the Enlightenment in America, if not in the world, Benjamin Franklin, was present at the creation. Also present in Philadelphia was witchcraft, the murder of a supposed witch by a mob in the streets outside the hall where the apostles of reason were creating the United States Constitution. When I stumbled upon this incident, it astounded me. It was a shock that it could have happened, but more of a shock that none of the famous men inside the hall thought it worthy of notice in any of their surviving papers—no expressions of revulsion, no anger, no reaction at all. I have reproduced the only records of the incident in the piece I have called “Postcript.” And I remain puzzled by this unremarked survival of gross superstition in action alongside enlightenment in action.

Only one hero in my gallery comes close to fitting Franklin's unflattering description: Christopher Columbus, subject of the first selection. Except in his daring to go where others feared to, he does not meet my criteria for a hero. But how could I leave him out? My own heroes were in some sense beneficiaries of his and his successors' taking “life and goods together” from the people they encountered in the New World. We are accessories after the fact, however remotely.

The last essay, like so many of the others, is an appreciation, a tribute. Perry Miller transformed modern understanding of the Puritans and, as mentor and friend, transformed me. I hold him personally responsible for whatever is new and true that I may have learned or taught about early America, in these essays or anywhere else.

—Edmund S. Morgan
New Haven, Connecticut
July 2008