Bernard Bailyn, W

Acad. Quest. (2021) 34.1 10.51845/34s.1.24 DOI 10.51845/34s.1.24 Reviews He won the Pulitzer Prize in history twice: in 1968 for The Ideological Illuminating History: A Retrospective Origins of the American Revolution of Seven Decades, Bernard Bailyn, W. and in 1987 for Voyagers to the West, W. Norton & Company, 2020, 270 pp., one of several volumes he devoted $28.95 hardbound. to the rising field of Atlantic history. Though Bailyn illuminated better than most scholars the contours of Bernard Bailyn: An seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Historian to Learn From American history, his final book hints at his growing concern about the Robert L. Paquette rampant opportunism and pernicious theoretical faddishness that was corrupting the discipline he loved and to which he had committed his Bernard Bailyn died at the age professional life. of ninety-seven, four months after Illuminating History consists of publication of this captivating curio five chapters. Each serves as kind of of a book, part autobiography, part a scenic overlook during episodes meditation, part history, and part of a lengthy intellectual journey. historiography. Once discharged At each stop, Bailyn brings to the from the army at the end of World fore little known documents or an War II and settled into the discipline obscure person’s life to open up of history at Harvard University, views into a larger, more complicated Bailyn undertook an ambitious quest universe, which he had tackled to understand nothing less than with greater depth and detail in the structures, forces, and ideas previously published books and that ushered in the modern world. articles. A fourteen-page epilogue During the zigs and zags of a long and contains passages that he extracted distinguished career, he emerged from prior publications to best as one of the foremost interpreters communicate his “understanding of the founding of the United States. of the nature of history and of some Robert L. Paquette is a prize-winning historian and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, 21 W. Park Row, Clinton, N.Y. 13323; [email protected]. He has taught at Hamilton College for thirty-seven years, where he held the Publius Virgilius Rogers Chair in American History for seventeen years until January 2011, when he resigned the title in protest of the educational di- rection of the college. His most recent book is The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (2017). Bernard Bailyn: An Historian to Learn From 143 of the problems of studying and Like Max Weber, Bailyn had writing about it.” Historical genius, an abiding interest in the religious he insisted, remained inextricably sources of capitalist development. linked to a narration in which the In chapter one, he returns to the life author demonstrated the very rare of Robert Keayne, a conflicted soul “capacity to project, like a novelist, a trying to justify himself near the nonexistent, an impalpable world in end of his life in mid-seventeenth- all its living comprehension, and yet century New England to both God to do this within the constraints of and his fellow Puritans. Three years verifiable facts.” before his death, Keayne composed Bailyn’s concluding appendix pays a 48,000-word apologia dressed as a tribute to the two most important last will and testament, which Bailyn historians who influenced him at had pored over in several publications Harvard: Samuel Eliot Morison and during the early part of his career. In Oscar Handlin. The blue-blooded the will, Keayne attempted at length Admiral stood as an imposing to justify his behavior. For Bailyn, the institution unto himself, aloof yet document revealed a dynamic at work, awe inspiring in habit, manner, how Puritanism’s seeming constraints and productivity. Bailyn calls the on acquisitiveness could serve to Brooklyn-born Handlin, the son of incentivize behavior that ultimately Russian Jewish émigrés, “the most challenged core beliefs. The will influential and creative historian of offered an unusually rich source into American social life in the second the vision of order of a prosperous, half of the twentieth century.” He, micro-managing merchant, prone to far more than Morison, who was back-sliding, who was both praised Bailyn’s initial graduate adviser, and vilified by his neighbors for mentored Bailyn and supervised behavior that sought to reconcile the to completion his dissertation on demands of Calvinist piety with the seventeenth-century New England lure of worldly money-making. merchants. From Handlin, author Bailyn spent several years of a multivolume study of liberty, teaching in Harvard’s school of Bailyn learned, it appears, a great deal education. Reading Werner Jaeger’s about its preciousness and fragility in monumental three-volume study of American life, a theme that surfaces Greek ideals and culture caused him to again and again in Bailyn’s own work. ponder the idea of paideia— in essence, the education necessary to allow the 144 Bernard Bailyn: An Historian to Learn From lineaments of a culture to survive the radical Whig critique of the from generation to generation—and exercise of arbitrary power by an how it could be applied to Elizabethan allegedly corrupt Court Party in institutions transferred to the late seventeenth-century and early colonial North American mainland. eighteenth-century England. Bailyn Necessarily, he examined the crucial elaborated on this theme in the site of informal schooling: the Ideological Origins of the American colonial family. His findings on the Revolution, his most renowned book. patrimonial household led him into Chapter three of Illuminating History a lively debate, with international appears to respond to critics who repercussions, described in chapter found the book too focused on elites two, with the British historian Peter and neglectful of how ordinary folk Laslett on family structure and the received elite ideas while offering pervasiveness of extended or stem variations of their own. Bailyn calls families in various societies. Bailyn’s on Habottle Doyle, Jr., a Boston influence contributed to a flurry of shopkeeper; the Reverend Stephen microcosmic studies of colonial New Johnson, an “ordinary preacher” England villages. Seminal research from Lyme Connecticut; and the by one of Bailyn’s graduate students, citizens of tiny Petersham in central Philip Greven, of four generations Massachusetts to demonstrate the of families in colonial Andover, revolution’s widely shared values Massachusetts, underscored just and how thoughtful and deeply how important the ownership and engaged were commoners in their distribution of land was to the turbulent times. The ideas that maintenance of family structure. incited revolutionary fervor across In preparing for publication a class lines “were not derived either collection of pamphlets composed from systematic, formal discourses during the revolutionary period, or from crass-self-interest.” In the Bailyn encountered an unanticipated midst of crises brought on by the abundance of hundreds of writings, Stamp Act and Quartering Act, the the majority of which attempted agitated Doyle kept up several years to explain why the colonists had of running commentary in the form revolted. For Bailyn, this literature, of inked insertions into Boston when examined as a whole, bespoke newspapers as if to explain to the a coherent, articulated world view, world what the colonists were fighting which borrowed heavily from for. The Reverend Johnson’s writings Bernard Bailyn: An Historian to Learn From 145 and sermons, also at the time of the Although Beissel’s quirky regimen Stamp Act, suggest how political cris subjected his followers to celibacy and de coeur were elevated to holy cause hunger, his genius, allowed to fire in a by sympathetic, visionary ministers. land of religious freedom, reinvented A draft state constitution sent out for the art of book illumination and commentary to towns and villages composed choral music so elevating throughout Massachusetts in 1780 and spellbinding that it attracted elicited a treasure trove of critical international commentary. responses from non-elites into which Early in his career, Bailyn aspired Bailyn tapped. Those from Petersham, to write a history of the Atlantic a town in central Massachusetts that world that favorably compared in would become a breeding ground for scope and erudition to Fernand Daniel Shay’s rebellion, presented the Braudel’s multivolume history of most comprehensive populist critique the Mediterranean world. The end of the proposed constitution on a wide of World II brought programs and range of the most searing liberty- alliances that encouraged Bailyn related issues of the day. and other scholars to pursue Atlantic Bailyn thanked the army for history, a “world in motion,” as a forcing on him the study of German, justifiable category of historical a language that allowed him as a analysis. Although he did not pioneer historian to more fully appreciate the a graduate program aimed at studying contributions of the many German- the dynamic post-Columbian Atlantic speakers who peopled America. complex, which incorporated within At the time of the Revolution, they it the Atlantic slave trade, he did run, comprised about one-third of the beginning in 1995, almost two decades’ population of Pennsylvania. The New worth of Atlantic history seminars World attracted dreamers, seekers, that gathered younger scholars from and utopians of all sorts, and in all over the world to explore central chapter four Bailyn singles out for themes. In chapter five, Bailyn reflects revisiting Johann Conrad Beissel, on that experience, which included a charismatic journeyman baker the unsettling yet exciting discovery from the Palatinate who before the that subjects he thought he knew outbreak of the Revolution carved rather well, he really misunderstood out of the woods near Philadelphia or understood only superficially. a perfectionist community in Competition between imperial anticipation of the Second Coming. powers bred warfare, which became 146 Bernard Bailyn: An Historian to Learn From endemic to the Atlantic world in the establishment, in some significant seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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