LAWRENCE HENRY GIPSON: HISTORIAN By JACKSON TURNER MAIN LN MARCH 1918, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review published articles by Arthur C. Cole, Homer C. Hockett, Theodore C. Blegen, and Lawrence H. Gipson. The last named, a thirty-seven-year-old professor at Wabash College, was to re- ceive his doctorate at Yale that summer. During the year Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., would celebrate his first birthday in neigh- boring Ohio, while in Buffalo Richard Hofstadter was already a year old. Among those who one day would parallel the young scholar's research, Edmund S. Morgan was a two-year-old Minnesotan and Howard Peckham was a Michigan lad of seven.' Gipson's article furnished little indication of its author's future career. Entitled "The Collapse of the Confederacy," it drew pri- marily upon secondary sources to demonstrate that the southern states suffered from various non-military ailments, essentially psychological. One wishes that the editor, with an eye to the next half-century, had suggested that the seven sentences beginning with "it" in the first five paragraphs were too many, and that the plain style possessed many virtues. Probably the article attracted little notice despite its eminent company. But in 1920 appeared the new Ph.D.'s Jared Ingersoll, which did indeed foreshadow the future, and which immediately established Gipson as an historian of the first rank. Like so many other first books, this indicated most of the writer's distinctive qualities, including his principal faults and-more notably-out- standing virtues. Ingersoll, as the subtitle made clear, was not technically a biography but "a study of American loyalism in relation to British colonial government." Gipson showed little interest in and scarcely touched upon Ingersoll's childhood environment, his experience as a student at Yale, or his legal career. The book focused on Connecticut's external affairs, examining its internal history only 'Curiously all four of these youngsters were Midwesterners, as was the writer, then a baby in Wisconsin. Gipson was born in Colorado, and raised in Idaho. 22 GIPSON: HISTORIAN 23 as that affected relations between Connecticut and Britain. What- ever contributes to an understanding of Ingersoll's loyalism and Connecticut's radicalism becomes relevant; whatever does not, is ignored. In discussing "environmental factors" Gipson treated politics fully but scanted most economic and social forces. After all, this was 1920, and the climate of historical opinion is suggested both by the rather thin socio economic background and by his remark that Connecticut lacked "broad humanitarianism" and 'generous idealism" because these qualities were "largely the product of that great leveling movement which at a later date swept eastward from beyond the Alleghenies." 2 He did, however, examine economic conditions when he considered them important, devoting part of a chapter to the colony's finances. Although Gipson occasionally criticized Ingersoll, the general tone of the book was sympathetic, and he presented British policies in a favorite light. He defended England's attempt to levy taxes. Connecticut, he acknowledged, did have, financial difficulties, but they resulted from excessive buying on credit of luxuries, and the colony could well afford to pay taxes. The author demonstrated in this matter as in other ways a refreshing willingness to publish his conclusions, however disagreeable to American mythology: the Connecticut rioters "lost the power of using rational means in defense of their cause, and sank back to the mental levels of the emotional primitive."3 Ingersoll's principal defect was stylistic. One sentence contained ten clauses and nine commas and another consisted of ten clauses with eleven commas. Semicolons replaced periods, passives oc- curred far too frequently, and the "It . that" construction, which continued a favorite, ruins a sentence beginning "It was voted, also, that no dealings should be had. ." Fortunately Ingersoll also reveals Gipson's principal strength. The "biblio- graphical note" drew attention to manuscripts in London, New Haven, Ridgefield, New York, Hartford, and Boston, as well as to an imposing list of published sources, contemporary tracts, and newspapers. Meticulously researched and judiciously considered, this first effort left its readers expectant. But they were in for a long wait. ''Ingersoll, p. 33. Ibid., p. 172. 24 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY Although Gipson was now thirty-nine, he did not rush to repeat his success. Indeed sixteen years passed before the publication of his next full-length book, and eleven before he published any- thing at all. In 1931 the American Historical Review printed his article on Connecticut's finances which, with another article, presently appeared in book form.4 Based upon additional research, the article elaborated a major thesis of the earlier work: the colony paid off almost its entire debt by 1765, using wartime profits and money paid by Britain as reimbursement for military costs, so that taxpayers were assessed almost nothing. This happy state of affairs, carefully concealed by Connecticut's leaders, would have enabled the people to contribute to the costs of empire had they been willing to do so. On the contrary, Gipson observed, it became "one of the ironies of history that the munificence of the mother country to Connecticut in her hour of need should ultimately have been returned by the colony from the muzzles of the guns of her embattled farmers" (p. 739). The article thus restated forcibly the direction of Gipson's research and the interpretation which was developing out of it. A few years later he termed the work of his mentor, Charles M. Andrews, "an epoch in American historiography" which reoriented his- torians toward the view that colonial history was part of the expansion of England.5 Many historians publish their doctoral dissertations, land their good jobs, and settle down to a lifetime of teaching until retire- ment when, as F. J. Turner reportedly wrote, they are permitted to cuss and fish. In his mid-fifties, nearing the retirement age, Gipson brought out three books, totalling some eight hundred pages, entitled The British Empire before the American Revolu- tion: Provincial Characteristics and Sectional Tendencies in the Era Preceding the American Crisis, I748-I754.6 The foreword I "Connecticut Taxation and Parliamentary Aid preceding the Revolu- tionary War," American Historical Review, XXXVI (1930-1931), 721-739; Studies in Colonial Connecticut Taxation (Bethlehem, Pa., 1931). "6"Charles McLean Andrews and the Re-Orientation of American Colonial Historiography," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LIX (1934), 209-222. The first volume of Andrews' magnum opus had just appeared. These volumes, then as now, comprised the first "book" of the general series entitled The British Empire before the American Revolution. They were published by the Caxton Printers, Ltd. (of which Gipson's brother James was president) in Caldwell, Idaho. Citations here are to the more GIPSON: HISTORIAN 25 proclaimed Gipson's determination to survey, in twelve volumes, the entire history of the British Empire between 1750 and 1776. Nine-as it turned out, eleven-to go at the age of fifty-six! But the oddmakers would have been wrong. The first volume concentrated on the British Isles during the mid-eighteenth century. It did not contribute to historical knowl- edge-although the author had done his homework-but was introductory, setting the stage for future books, and stressing only crucial attributes of the mother country. Gipson's picture is dynamic, rather than static, emphasizing the "active forces" which were transforming the Empire. Although the focus is on the year 1750, he ranges backward and forward to illustrate the important trends. He pays considerable attention to economic developments, devoting a chapter to England's economy, another to Ireland's, and interweaving economics and politics in his treatment of Scot- land and (in the revised edition) Wales. On the other hand, social and cultural characteristics together receive only one chapter, a section on the "scottish intellectual renaissance" being added later. Presumably the author knew what he was about: he felt that the significant factors which created the "old" empire and which wxould one day dismember it were economic and above all political rather than ideological or cultural. The general impression of England which the volume conveys is favorable. Although Gipson points out frankly that the Eng- lish drank too much gin, rioted too much, smuggled inordinately, and sometimes had to spend over half their income on food, he asserts that "the heart of the nation was sound." The people as a whole were "industrious, intelligent, resourceful, and practical- minded," who deserved their relatively comfortable standard of living; most "were without doubt people of solid qualities- honest, clearheaded, ingenious" (pp. 25, 61). Similarly, while he does not hesitate to term many aspects of the British government "reprehensible," he finds that it was successful, occasionally responsive to public opinion and, for the times, just. In this evalua- tion Gipson reflected the conclusions of Namier, whose major works had already appeared, rather than of the "Whig" historians, generally available revision of 1958. Incidentally 1936 was a vintage year 4or colonial historians, producing the second volume of Andrews' Colonial Period and Morison's Puritan Pronaos, as well as Gipson's "book." 26 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY though he had himself examined the primary sources. The chapter on Scotland emphasized the rapid economic progress of the Lowlands during the period being surveyed. He describes with feeling the distress of the Irish. Their economic depression he attributes only in part to the English conquest. His "spirit of detachment" obliges him to note that the people's poverty was to some extent unnecessary, partly because they refused to adopt agricultural reforms, and because they remained bitter and dis- couraged (p. 198). Yet even in the case of Ireland he is able to cite evidence of increasing wealth, indeed of "a very con- siderable degree of prosperity" (p.