American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less pejorative names for it. Call it the profit motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and everything that goes with it. Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks any more than the Spanish could. The story moves us, offends us, but perhaps the more so because we have to recognize ourselves not in the Arawaks but in Columbus and his followers.

  The Spanish reaction to the Arawak was Western civilization’s reaction to the barbarian: the Arawaks answered the Europeans’ description of men, just as Balboa’s tiger answered the description of a tiger, and being men they had to be made to live as men were supposed to live. But the Arawaks’ view of man was something different, and they were unable to recognize themselves as men in the role in which the invaders cast them. They were offered civility in the shape of clothing that they did not want, in return for work that they did not wish to perform.

  Civility and Christianity in the form of a cotton shirt and baptism were not adequate recompense for the liberty without which they had no will to live. They died not merely from cruelty, torture, murder, and disease but also, in the last analysis, because they could not be persuaded to fit the European conception of what they ought to be. Since they would not or could not accept the place assigned them in the Old World scheme for America, they had to give place to new men, African or European, who would make the country yield what was expected of it. The Arawaks of Española were the first to be pushed aside in this way but by no means the last. Although their story was only a small early incident in the Europeans’ total transformation of the Western Hemisphere, and ultimately of the world, it epitomized that transformation. It was indeed the first chapter of American history, as we know it, the first chapter of our history.

  —Previously unpublished

  Part Two

  PURITANS, WITCHES, AND QUAKERS

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dangerous Books

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, at a meeting of book collectors, I was brought up short by the remark of a man who valued books as most of us do. It was at Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library, and one of the luminaries present was a gentleman, considerably older than I, whom I respected and revered but frequently quarreled with. We were both members of several historical societies at which I had read papers. At the conclusion of each of my talks, he had risen to denounce me for a young radical and had pointed out with characteristic vigor that my papers were full of the most utter nonsense. “I admire,” he used to say, “the thoroughness of Mr. Morgan’s research, which is matched only by the absurdity of his conclusions.”

  I don’t think he thought I was a communist or an anarchist, but perhaps that I believed in free love or the New Deal or something on that scale of monstrosity. There had, nevertheless, grown up between us, at least I like to think there had, a certain affection and respect of the kind that may take place between people who recognize each other as opposites.

  On this occasion I was in a happy position of neutrality. I had not delivered the paper, and consequently he did not feel obliged to denounce me. I therefore thought that this might be a rare opportunity for conversation in which we might find ourselves in agreement. I discovered him examining a case of books in which was displayed a particularly handsome copy of Purchas his Pilgrims (1625). He was intent on his examination of the book and made a fine figure as he bent over the case, for he had a leonine head of long white hair that contrasted dramatically with the dark woodwork. I stood beside him for a time in silence, and then ventured the only remark that I could think of and one that seemed thoroughly innocuous—namely, that this copy of Purchas was remarkably clean, looking as though it had just come off the press.

  As soon as I had spoken, he turned on me with eyes blazing and said yes, indeed it was, and he hoped that it would remain in that condition, unlike the books in the Harvard Library. “That’s the tragic thing about the Harvard Library,” he said, “that fellow Jackson* lets those professors go in there and read those books any old time they have a mind to.”

  I beat a hasty retreat. But it has often occurred to me since that my friend, who gave a great deal to the Harvard Library, the John Carter Brown, and many other libraries, was more right than he knew. He was a man who hated change in any form. And there is no more insidious instrument of change than a library in which professors or students or people in general are allowed to read the books.

  In fact, in view of what books have done to change the world, it is strange that those who fear change have not succeeded in burning them all long since. The trouble with books is that people will read them. And when they do, they are bound to get new and dangerous ideas. Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work. And the ideas are not always benign. One thinks at once of Karl Marx, laboring through the musty volumes of the British Museum and emerging with those notions that turned the world upside down. Or the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—how much, one wonders, did its volumes contribute to the French Revolution?

  But we need go no farther for examples than to your library or mine. First, I should like to say a little about the extraordinary way the Yale Library in the eighteenth century took command of the college, subverted the purposes for which it was founded, and transformed it into something utterly different (something, in my opinion, infinitely better, but I am not sure that the founders would agree).

  Yale and the Yale Library were founded in 1701 by a group of Connecticut ministers who thought it was high time for the colony to have a college of its own. Connecticut Puritans had been talking about a college for years, for Puritanism was a bookish faith, and the Puritans thought that their leaders, whether in church or in state, ought to have a college education. In the seventeenth century Harvard had served the purpose, but Harvard was inconveniently located for Connecticut boys, and toward the end of the century uncomfortable rumors began to circulate about its orthodoxy. The Harvard faculty, it seemed, and notably the senior tutors, were reading the wrong kind of books and recommending them to the students, and everybody in Cambridge was getting fond of ideas that New Englanders were not supposed to be fond of.

  The Puritans were not afraid of books. They had too much confidence in the rightness of their own views to worry about anyone’s refuting them in print. And they were sure that neglect of reading was an invitation to that old deluder Satan, who might gain control of the souls of ignorant men. But if they were not afraid of books, the Puritans were afraid to let impressionable youth be taught by men who lacked the perspicacity to see that books by Anglicans were shallow and misleading, if not actually wicked. For it was Anglican books that the Harvard tutors had recommended—Anglican books that presumably espoused the insidious heresy known as Arminianism. Arminianism was the doctrine that man could help himself toward salvation. It implied that a man could alter God’s eternal decrees and get to heaven on his own merits.

  The Puritans, always prone to self-righteousness, were peculiarly susceptible to this heresy, and they were always on the alert for it. When they heard that it had penetrated Harvard, they became uneasy. Cotton Mather and Increase Mather tried their best to purge the college of it. When their efforts proved unsuccessful, they turned hopefully to the west, where Connecticut was at last roused to action. With the support of the Mathers and of other Bostonians who had been shocked by the turn of events at Harvard, Connecticut began a new college, dedicated to the preservation of both learning and orthodoxy.

  It started at Killingworth, Connecticut, with two faculty me
mbers and not more than a dozen students. For the first six years there were no college buildings other than the rector’s house. But there was a library.

  The men who founded the college had realized that it might exist without buildings but not without a library, and they had contributed from their own private holdings enough volumes to get it started. It was not much of a library, consisting as it did of old dog-eared volumes that had come over with the first settlers and had already served two generations of ministers in Connecticut without generating new ideas in anybody. For thirteen years these books continued to serve, but in 1714 one of the well-wishers of the college arranged an extraordinary donation.

  Jeremiah Dummer, a New England boy and a Harvard graduate, moved to England in 1708 and acted there as agent for the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Although his official duties did not require it, he also became an ardent propagandist and solicitor for both Harvard and Yale. Dummer recognized that what Yale needed more than anything else was books, and, since England was full of authors and patrons of authors, he undertook to persuade them to donate some of their favorite works to the college in the New World. There was an exotic attractiveness to the idea of planting civilization in the wilderness, and the English intellectuals were so moved by Dummer’s appeal that no fewer than 180 of them contributed, including such leading figures as Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Sir Hans Sloane, and Richard Steele. They sent more than 500 volumes, of which the first shipment, packed in nine boxes, arrived in September 1714.

  The unpacking of the crates must have been a moment of singular excitement and curiosity for students and faculty. Here was an enormous variety of riches: Newton, Locke, and Boyle, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Sherlock, Tillotson, Chillingworth, Stillingfleet—names that had hitherto meant nothing in Connecticut and not much in the rest of New England were suddenly present in the original. None of those who first opened the volumes and leafed through them could have recognized the full dimensions of what had happened. A century of English literature, science, philosophy, and theology was spread before them. It was as though a group of men today had studied nothing but the textbooks of a hundred years ago and were suddenly confronted for the first time with Darwin, Marx, Hegel, Freud, and Einstein, all at one blow.

  For many, of course, it was simply too much to comprehend. To be handed a hundred years’ work to do may not be an altogether pleasing experience. And it was a long time before the full effect of the new books was felt. But New England was never the same after their arrival, and we can see the leaven beginning to work at once.

  We can see it, for example, in a boy who rode down from Windsor to enter college two years later. In his sophomore year he discovered John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. By his own account, he found “more satisfaction and pleasure in studying it than the most greedy miser in gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasure.” This was Jonathan Edwards, who would probably have changed any world he lived in. But the starting point of the revolution that Edwards made in New England religion was that volume of Locke. He saw that New England theology, as he had learned it from his father’s sermons at Windsor, would not stand before the new philosophy of John Locke.

  He went on to recast the Calvinism of his father to fit the new philosophy, and the result was a wholly different theology, which came to be known in New England as the New Divinity. It won Edwards worldwide fame, and it split New England Puritanism wide open. It lost Edwards his pulpit at Northampton, and it won him the presidency of Princeton. A hundred years later people were still arguing hotly about what it meant.

  It took Edwards a lifetime to work out his theology after reading Locke, but within eight years of their arrival the new books produced a more spectacular result in a different group of readers. One of these was Samuel Johnson, a Guilford boy. Johnson graduated from college the year before the books arrived; but alumni could use the library, and Johnson read avidly in the new books. As an undergraduate he had studied the old system of logic taught from books that the founding fathers of New England had brought with them. His college notebooks survive, filled with the complicated propositions that summed up the whole of human knowledge for the academic mind of the seventeenth century. At the end of one of these notebooks he has written, “And by next Thanksgiving, November 16, 1715, I was wholly changed to the New Learning.” By which he meant that he had been reading John Locke and had decided to forget everything he thought he knew before.

  Johnson stayed on at the college as a tutor from 1716 to 1719, and then, the college having moved to New Haven, he took a position as the minister of the nearby West Haven Church. He could have had better jobs at a greater distance from New Haven, but he wanted to stay near those new books. The head of the college after its removal to New Haven was the Reverend Timothy Cutler, and he, too, spent his spare minutes in the library. Cutler and Johnson and another tutor, Daniel Browne, together with a number of the ministers of New Haven and the neighboring towns, formed a discussion group that met regularly in the library to talk over what they had been reading and to help each other master the new learning.

  As they read and talked and read again, they found themselves warming to ideas that they recognized as dangerous, the very ideas that Yale had been founded in order to overcome. They were becoming Arminians, and they were finding the Anglican writers appallingly attractive. And so, like the good Puritans they were, they kept reading, confident, no doubt, that they would arrive at the correct, orthodox position in the end. Instead, they were carried farther from it. What was worse, they could not confine their new ideas to themselves. In the realm of ideas, it is difficult to lead a double life. Few men who care about ideas at all have the talent for hypocrisy—to say what they do not believe. Consequently, the new ideas began to leak out. By the spring of 1722, the rumor was going round that “Arminian books are cryed up in Yale College for Eloquence and Learning, and Calvinists despised for the contrary; and none have the courage to see it redressed.”

  By September 1722 the rumor had grown to alarming proportions, but it is doubtful that anyone was quite prepared for what happened next. At the commencement ceremonies in that year, Rector Timothy Cutler closed his prayer with the words “And let all the people say Amen.” This must have made the audience gasp, for it was the form followed in the Anglican Church. The next day, as the trustees met in the library, Rector Cutler and six of his friends appeared at the scene of their crime and confessed: they had not only become Arminians but had all decided to join the Church of England and were going to leave for England at once to take orders.

  The consternation would not have been greater if the president of an American college, at the height of the Cold War, had told his trustees that he and his faculty and a number of leading local citizens had been reading Karl Marx together, had decided to become communists, and were departing for Moscow to receive instructions. In just twenty-one years from the date of its founding, the Yale Library had completely subverted the purpose for which the college was established. The Yale trustees, of course, promptly fired Rector Cutler and Tutor Browne, and everyone tried to talk the converts out of their conversion. In the course of the next month, three were persuaded back to Puritanism. But Rector Cutler, Tutor Browne, Samuel Johnson, and James Wetmore, the pastor, now the former pastor, of North Haven, were adamant. The books in the library were more persuasive to them than anything their friends could say. They departed for England, where they were ordained as ministers of the Anglican Church and, with the exception of Browne, who died in England, returned to form the spearhead of a drive to convert the rest of New England to Anglicanism.

  Yale meanwhile set about to recover its dignity. The trustees hired a series of rectors notable for their orthodoxy, culminating in the terrible-tempered Thomas Clap, who in 1745 assumed the title of president and kept the college firmly in the orthodox path. But neither Clap nor the trustees ventured to close the library. In fact, they accepted more books fo
r it from Bishop Berkeley and from Isaac Watts. Seditious volumes lay still available to innocent minds, ready to lure them to new and perhaps still worse heresies.

  The faculty at this time consisted of the president and two or three tutors. The president read lectures on various subjects, and the tutors heard the recitations of the various classes in the assigned reading. One of the tutors whom Clap hired in 1749 appeared to be a safe young man. Ezra Stiles was the son of Isaac Stiles, the North Haven minister who took the place of the Anglicized and departed James Wetmore. Isaac Stiles was a friend of Clap’s, and Isaac’s son Ezra made a good record in college as an undergraduate. After graduation in 1746, Ezra Stiles remained in New Haven, reading in the library and casting about for a career. There was only one thing wrong with this young man: he had an insatiable curiosity. If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is surely the father of it, and invention is heresy by another name. It was probably inevitable that Ezra Stiles, placed in reach of the Yale Library, would sooner or later arrive at a number of heretical ideas.

  He had been reading for three years after graduation when Clap hired him; and, though he himself may not have realized it at the time, he was already well launched toward a heresy worse than Cutler’s or Johnson’s. It seems to have begun with a book whose title sounded harmless: Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, printed in London in 1705. Clarke was a pious man, and much of his book was directed against the deists, who believed that divine revelation through the Scriptures was not necessary for the discovery and enforcement of moral precepts. Revelation, Clarke insisted, was necessary. You could go a long way with unaided human reason toward discovering God’s will, but you could not go far enough. Clarke’s admonitions had an effect on Stiles similar to that of warning a child not to stuff beans up his nose. His curiosity was whetted rather than satisfied.