American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  He went on to read Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and Pope’s Essay on Man. He was so impressed with Pope that he committed long passages to memory and entertained himself with recitations as he walked abroad or paced the floor of his room. He did not recognize either of these works as deistic, but he admired in them the same quality that deists admired, their rationality. They were doing for moral philosophy what Newton had done for natural philosophy. Newton’s method, Stiles had learned in college, was “to discard the authority of great names and ingenious Hypotheses in philosophy, and to rely instead wholly upon reason.” Why not do the same in religion? The ethical and religious writings of a Shaftesbury seemed to proceed on this principle; Shaftesbury looked to no scriptural writers for authority but argued his case from pure reason.

  As soon as Ezra Stiles examined his own religious beliefs in the light of these ideas, something had to give. The first thing to go was the Westminster Confession of Faith, a creed drawn up by an assembly of Puritan divines in the 1640s and generally regarded in New England as the authoritative statement of Christian doctrine. What made it authoritative? That a group of learned and pious ministers had written it? That the colony of Connecticut approved it? Stiles decided not; even though he may still have believed most of its doctrines, it was “no authoritative Standard of Truth.”

  This brought him up against another and more difficult question. If you rejected the Westminster Confession as an authoritative statement, why accept the Bible? Stiles never doubted the existence of God. Neither did the deists. But if he was rejecting the authority of great names, was there anything about the Bible to stamp it as the product of divine revelation? The mere fact that its authors said it was could hardly be sufficient proof.

  Ezra Stiles knew that if he decided the Bible to be something less than the word of God, he was a deist. And to be a deist was a pretty drastic and daring thing in New England. There were deists, especially among the lawyers, who seem to have been a notoriously ungodly lot, but they were not supposed to be tutors at Yale, corrupting the youth of Connecticut with ideas worse than Anglicanism.

  Ezra Stiles wrestled long and hard with his problem, and he did most of his wrestling in the library. He had read himself to the edge of deism with Shaftesbury, and he now tried to read himself back again with John Taylor, Joseph Butler, John Scott, and Isaac Watts. From these and other authors and from the Bible itself, he was able to conclude that the Bible, whoever wrote it, was a “most rational and sublime Scheme far exceeding natural Religion,” far exceeding, that is, any religion that was unaided by revelation. This was still not quite proof that the Bible was the word of God, but Stiles eventually convinced himself from the consistency of different apostles in relating the same facts, and from the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, that the Bible was indeed divinely inspired. By further reading in the writings of the early Puritans, he later developed into a thoroughgoing Calvinist.

  It might seem, therefore, that Ezra Stiles fully recovered from his bout with the library. But the books he read left a lasting mark upon him and, through him, on others. Having met temptation and survived, he concluded, perhaps too easily, that others who met it, as he had, would also survive. Though firmly committed to revelation, he continued to believe in reason. Let men read and think freely, he maintained, and they would come to truth in the end, just as he had. He had the same confidence as the old Puritans whom he admired, a confidence that reason would lead men to his opinions.

  But Ezra Stiles went a step beyond the Puritans. If reason did not bring other men to his opinions, he was content to let them hold their wrong opinions in peace. When he recovered his confidence in the Bible, he did not resume the proper New England stance with regard to the Westminster Confession. For him that was still no authoritative standard of truth. In fact, he retained a phobia against all creeds and tests in religious matters. Once he had established the authenticity of the Bible, he made it an excuse for not recognizing the authority of any man-made creed.

  While he was a tutor, Stiles’s rampant curiosity led him to write to authors all over the world, begging copies of their works for the college library. He went right on begging after he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, as pastor of the Second Congregational Church there. One of the men whom he solicited successfully was Henry Collins, a Newport Baptist, and among the books that Collins wished to give Yale were some by James Foster, a controversial but respected English theologian, who favored unitarianism and opposed infant baptism. Collins actually had no hopes of making Baptist converts through Foster’s writings. He merely wanted to make the learned world acquainted with the fact that Baptists could write learned books. But Clap had grown suspicious of heretical books, however learned. He had recently removed from the library some of those he considered most subversive, including one by Samuel Clarke, the author who had started Stiles on the road to skepticism. Having got these out of the way, Clap did not propose now to start filling the library with new evils. Rather than expose the students to Foster’s works, Clap refused the Collins gift. He had evidently become convinced that a library is a dangerous place.

  Ezra Stiles had not. Pained by Clap’s suppression of free inquiry, he wrote a letter suggesting that liberty offered a clearer road to truth than the kind of control that Clap was now exercising. “It is true,” Stiles admitted, “with this liberty error may be introduced; but turn the tables, the propagation of truth may be extinguished. Deism has got such head in this age of licentious liberty, that it would be in vain to try to stop it by hiding the Deistical Writings: and the only Way left to conquer and demolish it, is to come forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an even Footing.”

  This letter has a significance that extends beyond the circumstances of its composition, because in a little less than twenty years after he wrote it, Ezra Stiles became president of Yale College. Had he by this time overcome his youthful confidence in reason, he might have been a fit man to keep the students free from heresy. But he still had not altered from the sentiments expressed in his letter to Clap. He not only let the students read what they wanted but encouraged them to discuss controversial questions in every field of thought.

  His liberal policy escaped serious criticism during the Revolution and the early post-Revolutionary years, when the intellectual climate throughout America was effervescent. In Connecticut, however, conservative reaction gradually set in. People witnessed the growth of infidelity undermining their religion, and the new ideas of democracy assaulting their social and political habits of thought. They watched the French Revolution, from hopeful beginnings, boil over into the excesses of mob violence and regicide. They saw the formation of democratic clubs in America as a sure sign that the germs of the French Revolution had crossed the ocean and were about to breed a revolution of social classes in the land of the free. And so when their sons came home from Yale College with nicknames such as Rousseau and Voltaire, and with an admiration for such subversive Frenchmen, small wonder if eyebrows and tempers rose. President Stiles obviously let the students read and discuss these French infidels.

  Indeed, in spite of his firm belief in Calvinist Christianity, his sympathy for the French was notorious. Fifty years later, David Daggett, a New Haven lawyer, could recall Stiles accosting him on the street:

  “Have you heard the glorious news?” cried Stiles.

  “What news, Mr. President?”

  “The French have entered Holland—they have planted the Tree of Liberty before the Stadtholder’s palace. They will plant it before the palaces of all the princes of Europe. The people will live under its shade—I rejoice at it—I am a democrat—yea, I am a Jacobin—I glory in the name.”

  At a time when most men in Connecticut shuddered at the word Jacobin, Ezra Stiles gloried in the name, because he continued to believe that it spelled liberty. His faith endured that the way to truth “is to come forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an even Footing.” If free inquiry led to the death of kings, that
did not alarm or surprise him, for only tyrants, he believed, need fear the truth. His last book, published just before his death, in 1795, was a history of the men who condemned Charles I. It contained an impassioned defense not merely of that action but also of the execution of Louis XVI, and from there it rose to a white-hot polemic in favor of freedom of thought and the right of democratic clubs to hold and propagate their subversive doctrines in the United States.

  Ezra Stiles, as you can see, was a dangerous man. But the danger lay less in his own radical views than in the freedom he wanted for others, the freedom to read and from reading to think and speak the thoughts that dissolve old institutions and create new ones. That kind of freedom is as dangerous today as it was then. If we allow young men and women to read and think, we must expect that their thoughts will not be our thoughts and that they will violate much that we hold dear.

  The danger may appear remote that such innovating thoughts could arise from the study of rare books and manuscripts in a library dedicated to the American past. There exists among many persons today an assumption that the knowledge of our past will engender among its possessors a reverence for the status quo. Partly as a result of this assumption, there has arisen a widespread demand that young Americans know more about their history. Examination of our high-school and college graduates has in fact revealed a shocking ignorance of American history.

  Though I am perhaps a prejudiced observer, since I make a trade of studying and teaching American history, I share the general dismay at this ignorance, and I applaud all efforts to overcome it. In particular I applaud the attack at the root of the matter carried on in libraries. But I am not sure that the effect of wider knowledge will be what some of its advocates suppose. Several years ago one of our educational pundits sent out a questionnaire to college administrators with a question to this effect: Do you think that a better knowledge of American history would make American students less susceptible to other ideologies? I had not previously realized that American history was supposed to be itself an ideology, but that is clearly how this man thought of it, as a religion, of which the founding fathers were the prophets. I suggest that the study of American history could prove as productive of heresy in this religion of American history as the study of religious and philosophical treatises was in the Calvinist religion of eighteenth-century New England.

  Let us take just one article in the creed of our American ideology, the article that reads, “All men are created equal.” Ever since the Declaration of Independence, these words have enjoyed an almost sacred devotion from Americans. But history will reveal that Americans sometimes interpreted the words in ways that would not be greeted happily in all quarters today.

  Would anyone, for example, care to have the student derive from a study of American history the idea that all men should have an equal amount of property? Such an idea sounds like one of those “other” ideologies. But listen to the Reverend Benjamin Trumbull, a sober and respected New England parson, advising the freemen of Connecticut how to vote in 1773:

  It should also be the particular care of every civil community to keep their rulers as much as possible dependent on them, and intimately connected with them. For this purpose it will be highly politic, in every free state, to keep property as equally divided among the inhabitants as possible, and not to suffer a few persons to amass all the riches and wealth of a country: and also to have a special care how they adopt any laws, customs, or precedents, which have a tendency this way. For when men become possessors of the Wealth of a state, it will be in their power to purchase, or by undue influence…to thrust themselves into all places of honour and trust. This will put it in their power, by fraud or force to keep themselves in those important posts, and to oppress and tyrannize over their fellow-men. It will teach the people to look up to them, as to lords and masters, make them servile, and by little and little it will despoil them of all true liberty and freedom. But on the other hand, the keeping of property, as equally divided as possible among a people, will make elections more free, the rulers more dependent, and the liberty and privileges of the ruled vastly more secure.

  The Reverend Trumbull was speaking three years before Jefferson penned his famous words. He was arguing for the preservation of a condition that he believed to exist already. For he thought that property, in his own state at least, was pretty evenly divided. He wanted to keep it that way, and he believed in governmental action to preserve an even division. No one rebuked him. Indeed, many other examples of his sentiment can be found in the Revolutionary period.

  But suppose the student escapes the heresy that might grow from a projection of Trumbull’s sentiments. Suppose he examines the ideas of Jefferson himself. Jefferson’s affirmation of human equality has informed the most profound and most needed changes in American society for more than two centuries. Yet Jefferson could lead the student to a very novel application of equality. Jefferson thought that the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead, a stirring rhetorical concept, with a strong appeal to the young. With Jefferson it was not mere rhetoric.

  He thought that all men, of whatever generation, were created equal, and that therefore one generation was not bound by the actions of the preceding one. From tables of mortality he calculated that the majority of the adult inhabitants in a country at a given time would be dead in about twenty years. A generation, therefore, might be taken as lasting twenty years and should have authority only for its own duration. No government should have authority, for example, to contract debts for its successor. A people, therefore, could repudiate debts contracted by their government more than twenty years previously. Such a doctrine, if applied today, would dissolve, among other institutions, the United States government.

  Benjamin Trumbull was a respected clergyman, and Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States. The study of the American past would lose some of its richness and excitement if we confined our study to such respectable and eminent persons. We cannot neglect the various movements for reform. Some of these were so extreme or eccentric that our students are not likely to be infected by them with any zeal for imitation, or if they are it will not matter. We need not, for example, worry about the kind of equality that Bronson Alcott and his followers practiced in 1843, at Fruitlands, their Utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts, where even the cows were considered equal and not subjected to the degrading exploitation of being milked.

  But there was one equalitarian movement that proved successful and that still has implications in American life, the movement for abolition of slavery. The historian’s understanding of this movement was transformed in the last century by the publication of the letters of Theodore Dwight Weld in 1934. Anyone studying abolitionism must begin with these letters, and in them will be found ideas to shake any tendency to look upon American history as a source of conservatism. Theodore Weld was one of the great radicals of the nineteenth century. In fact, he was almost a caricature of a radical.

  By his own confession he never combed his hair from one end of the year to the other. He never had any fixed time for shaving, but waited until his beard chafed against his collar and then shaved simply to avoid the discomfort. His appearance was so appalling that children fled in terror when he entered a room. He was completely absentminded, with a very poor memory. He was constantly meeting people who greeted him affectionately but whom he could not remember having seen before. He used to peel an apple, eat the peelings, and throw the apple away. He used to go for walks in the middle of the night, in the course of which he climbed young trees, swung the top of them down to the ground, and jumped off. As a grown man, he liked to dive off high cliffs, stand on his head, scream like a loon, run on all fours. In other words, to all outward appearances he was a complete nut.

  Yet this man had one of the most commanding personalities of his time. He could truthfully say in a letter to his future wife in 1838, “Those with whom I have been associated have always deferred and conceded to me—they have spontaneously yield
ed to me…. And yet so far from having a desire to be looked upon as a leader, to be a leader, I always loathed and spurned it, and from a child have always refused all office and worked in the ranks as a common soldier and yet in reality did actually control and give shape to a thousand things with which I seemed to have nothing to do.”

  One of the things Weld gave shape to was the movement for abolition of slavery. He controlled it without seeming to, kept it from being sidetracked into ineffectual demands for other kinds of equality, made it a powerful instrument of reform. He believed in the fullest social and racial equality, but with a perfect sense of timing knew just how much to ask for at once. Though he stayed well ahead of both the Supreme Court and the election returns, he did not get so far ahead as to be out of sight. The United States began to catch up with him in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and is still moving in his direction. It is not improbable that some of us may live to see it overtake him. He was and is a dangerous man, and the dangerous part of him is housed in libraries, where he may still incite men to decency.

  One might go on with a list of dangerous Americans who defied the orthodoxy of their times and could teach their readers to do likewise. One can find them in every period, from Roger Williams in the seventeenth century to Henry Thoreau in the nineteenth. But there is no need to enlarge the list. My point is that those who fear change and hope to find protection against it in American history are likely to be disillusioned. If they could control the kind of history taught in our schools and colleges, they might conceivably be successful. But while libraries exist, where students and scholars can go to the original sources and discover the facts for themselves, all efforts at control will be futile. The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books “any old time they have a mind to,” libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our life than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.