After writing Edwards, Miller resumed work on the second volume of The New England Mind, subtitled From Colony to Province. In the earlier volume, while describing the tensions and paradoxes of New England Puritanism, he had not attempted to trace their unfolding in time. In Colony to Province, he took up again the theme initiated in Orthodoxy in Massachusetts: the impact of time and of the American experience on the system of ideas the Puritans brought with them. This is perhaps his greatest work, showing how in the isolation of the New World paradox and tension turned to contradiction and generated personal rivalries and party splits within New England orthodoxy. The central figure of the book is Cotton Mather, who with his father represented a conservative effort to keep the system as closely knit as possible. Attacking the Mathers on the one side stood Solomon Stoddard and on the other John Wise. And attacking them in the center stood Miller himself, mercilessly laying bare the egotism behind their efforts to retain control.
In one passage Miller revealed something of his own technique. To understand the Mathers, he insisted (and for that matter the rest of New England as Miller saw it), it was necessary
that we appreciate the habit of speech that grew up in New England as an inevitable concomitant of the jeremiads: references had to be phrased in more and more generalized terms, names never explicitly named, so that we are obliged to decipher out of oblique insinuations what to contemporaries were broad designations. When ministers denounced “oppression” and “luxury,” they meant certain people whom they did not have to specify. The controversy between moderates and the charter party must be deduced from what seem like platitudes in election sermons, where minor shifts of emphasis betrayed party maneuvers. This habit of ambiguity, developed out of New England’s insecurity, out of its inability to face frankly its own internal divisions, out of its effort to maintain a semblance of unity even while unanimity was crumbling—which became more elaborate and disingenuous as internecine passions waxed—was to cling to the New England mind for centuries. We look ahead to the decades in which an emerging Unitarianism swathed itself in terms of studied vagueness; even after the split, the habit clung especially to the Unitarian pulpit, many of whose brightest lights were proud that their sermons never indicated any awareness of controversy. In Boston society today, matters may be fully discussed which, to an outsider, seem never to be mentioned at all. Such tribal reticence only an occasional Thoreau was to defy or an Emily Dickinson to turn into secret triumph.
And we may add that among historians only a Miller would have the daring, the imagination, and the learning to penetrate that tribal reticence. At the end of the volume we are ready for the unfolding of Edwards’s giant cryptogram.
By 1953, when Colony to Province appeared, Miller’s years of reading in later American history and literature were demanding more expression than he could give them in his teaching, and he was again impatient to reach ahead. He projected a large-scale study of American thought from the Revolution to the Civil War, leaving behind for a time the intervening history of New England. As usual, there were preliminary forays in articles, monographs, anthologies, and even one lengthy book, The Raven and the Whale, which he once referred to, while writing it, as a “comic book.” There was also an introduction to a newly discovered journal of Henry Thoreau, as dazzling a piece as Miller ever wrote.
The new work was never finished. The scraps he had written were published posthumously in 1965 as The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Although this book won a Pulitzer Prize, it was only a draft of what he was discovering about the replacement of theology by juristic and scientific thinking as a way of apprehending reality. He had only begun to trace the new patterns of thought he saw emerging, when he died in 1963, at the age of fifty-eight.
Miller’s distinction lay in an extraordinary ability to discover order where others saw chaos, and to express his deepest insights without uttering them, by tracing unsuspected patterns in the raw materials of the past. Only one who has studied the raw materials for himself can fully appreciate the beauty of those patterns in The New England Mind or how faithfully they encompass the materials. No one but Miller, in fact, has in our time known so well the materials of New England history during the period that he covered. But a few of us have studied some of them. To do so and then to read or reread Miller is to be stunned not only by his familiarity with the sources but by the way he has put into a paragraph interpretations and observations that one might expect to find as the conclusion of a whole monograph. And good monographs were written, are being written, and doubtless will be written to document in detail what Miller has already said and could himself have documented.
How, then, are we to assess his achievement? It is, of course, true that he has had a powerful influence of the kind that other great historians have had. He has changed in many ways the standard picture of early New England. Because of him we know now that the founders of Massachusetts were non-separating Congregationalists, that the exodus to Connecticut was not the result of a democratic impulse, that the antinomian controversy involved a dispute between John Cotton and other ministers in which Cotton was defeated and obliged to accept the doctrine of preparation, that New England theologians employed the logical system of Peter Ramus, that they made the covenant of grace the central doctrine of their system, and that Jonathan Edwards repudiated that doctrine. These and a great many other such propositions, which have found or will eventually find their way into the standard textbooks, can be counted as a heritage of Miller’s work.
But to make such a statement is to reduce the man to the terms by which we measure other historians. One feels a similar incongruity in observing, what is true, that because of him a great many other scholars are now studying Puritanism. Some of these are his students, and it is more than a personal observation that Perry Miller was a great teacher. You could not be in his presence without feeling that he cared about you and your ideas. Indeed, he always saw so much more in your ideas than you had seen yourself that you were compelled to stretch your imagination and to reach beyond yourself. Something of this impetus was communicated by his writings to persons who never saw him. He was a man thinking, and the phenomenon is so rare that it cannot fail to affect everyone who sees it or hears of it. To be sure, it excited envy, mistrust, and dislike as well as imitation. People almost seemed to hope that he was drinking himself to stupefaction, so that his relentless creativity could not continue to chide. And when at last he was gone, one sensed a subdued relief at the funeral service. But there is no escape from his example. Such men do not live without effect.
Yet one remains in the end with the sense that his influence was incommensurate with his genius. Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, whose intellectual achievements were inferior to Miller’s, had at least as great an influence on the study of history as Miller had or is likely to have. He was, in fact, not a leader of thought, because at the level he worked, thought will not bear leading. He raised a standard to which no one could rally. His true achievement lay not in altering the general picture of early New England, or in the encouragement he gave his students, or even in the example he set to men who would think. His achievement was a series of books the like of which had not been seen before, the record of a mind that craved reality and reached for it through history, as others have reached through religion or philosophy. Only when historians become philosophers and philosophers historians will the full significance of his achievement be understood.
—1964
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK EXISTS as a book because Robert Weil at W. W. Norton shared my view of what makes heroes and heroines. His editorial skills and those of Otto Sonntag have sharpened the language of all the essays. And I can recognize in all of them the guiding hands and historical insights of two people who have successively shaped my understanding of the past: Helen M. Morgan and Marie Morgan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDMUND S. MORGAN, who received his Ph.D. at H
arvard University studying with Perry Miller, was born in 1916 in Minneapolis. He has written for the New York Review of Books for over forty years and has published more than fifteen books, including Benjamin Franklin; Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, which won Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989; and American Slavery, American Freedom, which won the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Prize, and the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award.
Joining the faculty at Yale University in 1955, he trained a generation of students in early American history and was named a Sterling Professor in 1965, retiring over two decades later in 1986. In 1971 he was awarded the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for most outstanding teaching and scholarship, considered one of the most prestigious teaching prizes for Yale faculty. One year later, he became the first recipient of the Douglas Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association. Among other honors, he has received the National Humanities Medal in 2000, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 2008 Gold Medal for History. A woodturner and furniture craftsman of distinction, he lives in New Haven with his wife, Marie Morgan.
* William Jackson, Harvard's distinguished curator of rare books, 1938–64.
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