American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  Americans in 1787 were still close to the original representative function. A representative in American experience had almost always been someone who was familiar with the needs of his community, someone the people in it knew and trusted and sent off to the government to look after their interests. And a representative assembly was supposed to be a mirror of the various communities that participated in it. It was a substitute for an assemblage of the whole people. It should therefore be, as John Adams said, “in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” When the British Parliament began taxing the colonies in 1764, Americans had accordingly complained not only that they were not represented in Parliament but that they could not be. Distance forbade it. They could not be represented, because a representative sent to London would be out of touch with his constituents and therefore unable properly to convey their views and look after their interests. He would not be able to think, feel, and act like them at so great a distance.

  England actually had no intention of allowing Americans to send representatives (it was suggested but not seriously considered). Instead, England responded to the American charge by affirming in absolute terms the other aspect of representation, emphasizing the function of representatives as governors, as a kind of elective aristocracy. Americans, it was said, might not actually vote for members of the House of Commons, but they were nevertheless represented there in the same way as most other British subjects, most of whom could not vote: they were “virtually” represented. Virtual representation meant that every member was discharged from local responsibilities and charged with looking after the running of the whole society. He represented everybody. To Americans this was so ridiculous as to be scarcely worth an answer. One might as well say that Parliament represented the whole world (a proposition that may not have seemed wholly absurd to Englishmen of that day). And Americans declared in no uncertain terms that the only persons who represented them were those whom they had elected to their own representative assemblies.

  The quarrel with England thus reinforced the Americans’ emphasis on the local character of representation, the representative’s attachment to the community that chose him. It was representatives schooled in this traditional concept who assumed nearly all powers of government in America, once the break with England was made. Fresh from proclaiming local autonomy against the superintending power of king, Parliament, royal governors, and governor’s councils, they had now themselves to exercise or direct whatever overall superintending powers there might be. To the Continental Congress (which was not popularly elected and thus not a representative assembly), they would allow no coercive powers, and in the state governments they subordinated all other branches—governors, judiciary, and upper houses—to themselves in their representative assemblies. As a result, even at the state level, larger, long-term concerns were sacrificed, and at the national level the Continental Congress lost the grudging support given it under pressure of war. Hence the local mischiefs which troubled Madison and his friends so much, and which even the Antifederalists acknowledged.

  What the Antifederalists would not acknowledge was that the way to overcome the mischiefs was through a supreme national government in which representation as Americans understood it would be nonexistent, a national government that might reduce the states to impotence and thus effectively demolish true representative government everywhere in the United States. The kind of representation proposed by the Constitution for the national government looked several degrees worse than what the colonists had renounced and denounced in the quarrel with England. If Americans could not be properly represented in the British House of Commons, no more could they be in a national House of Representatives. America was a large and growing country. The capital would be too far away for proper representation of most parts of it. And to compound the difficulty the Constitution proposed a House of Representatives so small as to suggest a deliberate repudiation of what Americans had always demanded in their governments. In the British House of Commons 558 members inadequately represented 6 million people. The Constitution provided for a House of Representatives that would initially contain only 65 members to represent 3 million people spread over a much larger territory than England, and future houses were not to contain more than one representative for every 30,000 persons. The first United States House of Representatives would be smaller in size than most of the state representative assemblies. Double the number, triple it, the situation would be improved, but not much. In order to have the ratio of representation Americans were accustomed to, the House would have to seat 2,000, a veritable mob, incapable of deliberating about anything.

  As the Antifederalists saw it, the consequence of any attempt to extend representative government to so large a country as the United States had to be an instant aristocracy or oligarchy. Admit with Madison that there would be a large pool of talent from which to draw representatives; it was not talent, however, that was needed in a representative but familiarity with the situation of the people he represented. If he was going to think for them, he ought to think like them. And anyone who was well-enough known to 30,000 people to be elected to Congress was not going to be someone who would think like most of them. He was going to be a man of reputation, someone who had been born to wealth and position or who had climbed or clawed his way there over the bodies of people who did not think or feel like him.

  Or admit with Madison that the United States contained a great variety of people with a great variety of interests, would that variety be embodied in a house of representatives of 65 men or 130 or even 200, a size that most Americans of the time seemed to consider maximum for effective deliberation? On the contrary, to the Antifederalists it seemed likely that they would be all of a kind, the kind that could be designated “natural aristocrats.” The United States did not have and would not have a hereditary titled aristocracy. The proposed Constitution forbade it, just as the Articles of Confederation had forbidden it. But that did not mean that some men were not much richer, more powerful, more looked-upto than the rest. The most thoughtful Antifederalist pamphleteer (the anonymous “Federal Farmer”) estimated the number in the whole country at four or five thousand. From those five thousand, the Antifederalists predicted, the members of Congress would inevitably be drawn. Lesser men—the middling sort of farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen—would not be widely enough known outside their immediate neighborhoods to win the necessary votes. No representative would embody their interests. In order for a representative body to be a picture of the people represented, it had to be chosen from small districts, small enough that the people would all be acquainted, so that they could vote for men like themselves, whom they knew personally and not simply by reputation. Such small districts were possible in elections for a state legislature, but on a national scale they would produce too large an assembly to be workable. A national government, though representative in form, would have to be unrepresentative in fact. It ought not, therefore, to have the extensive powers that the Constitution proposed for it. It ought to be subordinate to the state governments.

  Were the Antifederalists wrong? Was Madison right? Yes and no. Representative government of the kind the Antifederalists valued in the state governments was clearly what Madison did not want in the national government, and the fact that the size of the nation would eliminate that kind of representation was, for him, all to the good. Attachment to local interests was what he hoped the national government would overcome; natural aristocrats were just what he wanted in the national House of Representatives. But the men he encountered there a few years later were not quite what he had expected, and he was not altogether happy with the way they behaved. Nor did he find them as varied in their interests or as unable to agree in oppressing others as he had predicted. Fortunate for him that he did not succeed in securing a national veto over state legislation, for by 1798 he was trying for a state veto over national legislation.

  Fortunately he did not succeed
in that either. Representative government is bound to disappoint those who expect too much from it—or too little. It is merely not as bad as other, more rational kinds of government, whether in a small territory or a large one. It requires that representatives think sometimes the way Federalists wanted them to and at other times the way the Antifederalists wanted. And despite Antifederalist fears, national representatives have somehow managed to carry on this balancing act. They did not all turn out to be natural aristocrats (can we doubt that mediocrity is fully represented among them?). They did not annihilate the state governments. They did not become, in the long run, any more menacing to civil and political liberties than their counterparts in the state governments. Often they have protected those liberties when the states failed to. They did not, then, quite fulfill the Antifederalists’ fears. Nor did they quite fulfill the Federalists’ hopes. And just as well. In republican government a shutout victory is not a good thing.

  —1982

  EPILOGUE

  The Genius of Perry Miller

  PERRY MILLER, the Harvard professor who transformed our understanding of what the founders of New England founded, did not look like your usual professor. His manners were rough; his bearing was not quite the one expected of a professor; and his casual conversation was calculated to shock. He sometimes affected an uncouthness that made a perceptive listener at one of his lectures ask why he kept insisting that he was really a stevedore. The answer, perhaps, was that he feared dignity might not merely substitute for learning but overcome it. Indeed, his posture carried the suggestion that such a conquest had occurred in some academics whom he saw around him.

  It did not occur in him. The seeming stevedore, with the best historical mind of his generation, perhaps of his century, devoted it earnestly, fruitfully, humbly, and unrelentingly to scholarship. His very industry was a rebuke to those of us with fewer talents, who had greater need to work but could not match his intensity. And he compounded the force of the rebuke by working at a subject cast aside by previous scholars as too arid to be worth investigating: Puritan theology. Even in his last years, when he often appeared to be in a state of collapse, he outdid persons of greater dignity who were granted higher honors by the scholarly world.

  Miller’s first book, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650, which appeared in 1933, was itself an orthodox, if brilliant, piece of scholarship in which he had not yet hit his stride. It has been more widely read than his other works because it is more conventional. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, like most other scholarly monographs, can be summarized. In brief, it demonstrated what a few scholars had argued, though none so conclusively, that the founders of Massachusetts believed in a congregational ecclesiastical polity before they came to the New World, even though they had remained within the Church of England. It also described some of the problems they encountered in putting that polity into practice.

  The only real hint of Miller’s ultimate objective was the fact that the book gave so much attention to ideas. It was no novelty to be writing about the New England Puritans with respect. The denunciations of H. L. Mencken and James Truslow Adams had already been arrested, among historians at least, by Kenneth Murdock’s Increase Mather and Samuel Eliot Morison’s Builders of the Bay Colony. Miller had come to Cambridge to sit at the feet of Murdock and Morison, and seemed to be echoing their views in the preface when he hazarded the thesis “that whatever may be the case in other centuries, in the sixteenth and seventeenth certain men of decisive importance took religion seriously; that they often followed spiritual dictates in comparative disregard of ulterior considerations; that those who led the Great Migration to Massachusetts and who founded the colony were predominantly men of this stamp.” He added, “I have simply endeavored to demonstrate that the narrative of the Bay Colony’s early history can be strung on the thread of an idea.”

  Coming after the works of Murdock and Morison, the words did not sound especially daring, but probably no one realized, perhaps not even Miller, how much he meant by them. It was a time when religious ideas excited hardly anyone. Avant-garde intellectuals dismissed them as pie in the sky, and divinity schools busied themselves with the arduous problems of homiletics. Miller himself was an atheist and never pretended to be anything else. With a historian’s objectivity he had shown that some people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cared enough about religious ideas to act upon them. But it would have seemed a little ridiculous for an atheist to take religious ideas seriously except insofar as they affected action.

  That, however, is precisely what Miller did. Meticulously, chronologically he read everything written by Puritans in England or New England in the seventeenth century (in his spare time he read American literature of the nineteenth century and regularly offered new lecture courses on the literature of the South and West, local color, industrialism, romanticism). In 1939, six years after Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, he published The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, a belated summa theologica of New England Puritanism. In this and his subsequent works, instead of treating ideas as they affected actions, Miller scarcely mentioned actions except as they affected ideas. And yet by spelling out the ideas through which people of the time understood what they were doing, he rewrote their history. In occasional sentences, as in an unembellished line drawing, he was able, almost casually, to reconstruct social, political, and even economic history. Once one had the scheme of the thing clear, he seemed to say, it was scarcely worth the trouble to paint in the details of who did what.

  The academic world received The New England Mind with cautious, bewildered plaudits. It was difficult reading, and most readers attributed the difficulty to unskillful writing. Those who spent enough time at it recognized that the trouble did not come from the writing, which was always clear and usually brilliant, but from the complexity of the intellectual system that the book describes, and even more from the subtlety of the author’s observations about that system. Miller saw in Puritan theology a vast apparatus for describing reality. He wished to delineate it without simplifications so that his contemporaries might compare it with their own systems, to which they too often attributed a greater degree of sophistication. But Miller could not be content with the role of expositor. He was forever poking the apparatus here to show how it responded there. And the result, to any but the most careful follower of the text, was confusing. It was difficult to see precisely how the parts were connected. And how could anything be so complicated? Where did the Puritans stop and Miller begin? An eminent historian once confessed to me that reading Miller was to him like watching Einstein at a blackboard: he was impressed, he recognized there was something deep going on, but he did not know what.

  Actually it is not impossible to treat The New England Mind as conventional intellectual history. One can describe its findings like those of any other scholarly work: its discovery of hitherto unsuspected elements in Puritan thought, such as humanism, Scholasticism, and the logic of the sixteenth-century philosopher Peter Ramus, its demonstration of the central role played by the doctrine of the covenant. Yet to say this is to say too little, for what Miller had done was to create a new genre of intellectual history. His book was not a building block for that imaginary tower of learning to which historical labors are always said to offer “contributions.” Nor was it the end product of such contributions by others. Though Miller was always more than generous in acknowledging the help he received from the work of other scholars, The New England Mind in fact owed surprisingly little to anyone else’s scholarship. It was an end product produced at a single stroke, a work of synthesis created when there were no contributions to synthesize. The New England Mind is both a description of a complex system of thought and a translation of that system into a universal commentary on the human condition. It is at once a work of history and a testament.

  Miller had begun a second volume when the war interrupted him. After the war, however, he turned first to a study of Jonathan Edwards. In doing so, he was reaching ahead
from the seventeenth century to the individual who in the eighteenth had worked most creatively with the intellectual problems that Miller had already identified and described. In Edwards, Miller saw the most challenging intelligence of American history, and the way Miller accepted the challenge is indicated in his astonishing statement that the whole of Edwards’s writing constituted a giant cryptogram, which could be unraveled only by reading between the lines.

  Previous scholars had recognized Edwards as a genius, but they had usually been content to praise him and hurry on; for Edwards’s writings, though extraordinarily lucid as theological writing goes, were, like Miller’s own, extraordinarily difficult to those not versed in theology and not willing to give days and nights to them. Miller implied that Edwards’s writings were deceptively simple, and the message he decoded from them was complex—an amalgam of Edwards’s system and Miller’s explorations of its implications.

  Again, it is possible to state the main point made, that Edwards had recast the Puritan message in terms of Lockean psychology and Newtonian physics, that he had repudiated covenant theology and leapt into a modern way of apprehending the world, leapt so far that the twentieth century has not yet overtaken him. But again, to state the point is to state much less of the book than would be the case with another writer. The genius lies in the tissue of implications and overtones that Miller wove around his story. He had become so familiar with New England thought that he could see the radical purpose in a conventional sermon or catch the personal gibe hidden in a theological treatise. Though he scorned the writing of social history, he revealed, almost parenthetically, the inner workings of New England society in the family feuds, local quarrels, and political maneuvers that swirled around the ideas of Jonathan Edwards.