The Art of History as Philosophy

An Introduction

This essay was really meant to be the introduction to what otherwise would have been a single essay titled “The Two Pictures; Or, When the United States Became America.” The purpose of the original essay was to contrast post-Founding America with pre-Founding America in order to better see how the American Founding was revolutionary. As is so often the case with my writing, what otherwise would and should have been a short introduction has itself become its own, stand alone essay. I haven’t decided yet whether I will publish the “two pictures” as one essay or two separate ones.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.—Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (1775)

The American Founding was, as we began to see in our last essay, revolutionary. It was revolutionary in what it was, in what it did, and in what it created. The actual founding of the United States—that founding “moment” during the 15-year period between 1776 and 1791—was a revolutionary act (i.e., revolutionary in its principles, institutions, and the relationship between them), and the society that issued from it was revolutionary in its various manifestations.

But how, in what ways was the American Founding revolutionary? How did the Founding change the American way of life? How did the principles and institutions of the American Founding revolutionize the way the American people thought and acted?  

These are complex questions with multi-dimensional answers that cut in many directions. One obvious way to answer these queries is to compare life in post-Founding America with that of pre-Founding America. In other words, we might ask how life in England’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonies was different from the way of life in the United States during the nineteenth century. By drawing this contrast, we can better see and understand what was different, unique, important, and, yes, revolutionary about the American Founding.

And yet this task of contrasting pre-Founding with post-Founding America is inherently difficult because any attempt to create snapshots of discrete moments in time (especially “moments” that cover decades) must capture both the change and continuity that are necessarily imbedded in any one single point in time. In other words, it is difficult to capture in a single portrait what is really a moving picture. Post-founding America was a different place than pre-founding America, and yet trace elements of the latter are to be found in the former. The late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American sociologist William Graham Sumner noted in his mostly now forgotten work on Folkways that early seventeenth-century Puritan manners and mores were still alive in modern America:

The mores of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper and world philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an illustration be seen both of the persistency of the spirit of the mores and of their variability and adaptability. The mores of New England have extended to a large immigrant population and have won large control over them. They have also been carried to the new states by immigrants, and their perpetuation there is an often-noticed phenomenon. 

Furthermore, the differences between these two periods were sometimes differences of kind and sometimes they were differences of degree. How can these similarities and differences be accounted for?

To further complicate matters, we should also take into account Alexis de Tocqueville’s contention in Democracy in America that America was founded twice: first, there was the founding of 13 separate colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (each one different from the others); and second, there was the re-founding of the colonies into states culminating in the founding of the United States in the last quarter of the eighteenth-century. But as we drill down into the reality of these two general founding periods, their similarities and differences are compounded by complications: first, the separate founding of each colony was different from the others (some were founded as charter, royal, or proprietary colonies); second, the separate founding of each state in the 1770s and 1780s  was different from how the colonies were founded; third, the separate founding of each state was different from the others; and finally, the founding of United States in 1788 was different from the founding of the various states. The portraits we seek to paint are inherently messy.

Still, despite all these differences, Tocqueville claimed that the founding of the 13 colonies shared one important principle with the founding of 1788: i.e., the idea of freedom. There is certainly some truth to this claim. But even Tocqueville’s assertion is at best a partial truth and not without serious qualification. Some elements of the Puritans’ understanding of freedom are no doubt built into the Founding of 1788, but I do contend, contrary to Tocqueville, that the Puritans’ understanding of freedom was categorically different from that of the Founders of the United States.

By freedom, the Puritans meant two things: first, the freedom to govern themselves collectively as a community free from the English Parliament, the English Crown, and the Church of England; and second, the freedom to do, as the Puritan Governor John Winthrop put it, “that only which is good, just, and honest.” Such freedom is, he continued, maintained and exercised through “subjection to authority.” In other words, freedom for the Puritans is the freedom to obey. They rejected what they called “natural” liberty, which is man’s freedom to “do what he lists; it is the liberty to evil as well as to good.” By contrast, America’s Founding Fathers understood freedom in a very different way. They understood freedom to be the right to self-government, which is the freedom to act without government permission or the permission of the community—the freedom to think, choose, act, produce, and trade based on one’s own judgment. In fact, the Founding generation’s conception of freedom would have been rejected by the Puritans as a form of “natural” liberty and therefore put under lock and key.

With all these complexities in mind (and many others not here mentioned), let us proceed tentatively, cautiously, and judiciously in our attempt to paint two pictures of American life (i.e., pre- and post-Founding), but let us also commit ourselves to seeking hitherto unseen dimensions of the American story. Maybe, just maybe, we shall discover new pathways that uncover or reveal the deeper meaning or new realities of American history. Just as gravity had always existed but was unknown to man until Sir Isaac Newton, maybe historians of the American past have failed to see what is most distinctive and determinative about our history.

Let us attempt, then, to see the hitherto unseen. Sometimes there is a truth beyond what our eyes see or even beyond the simple sum of what our eyes see.

History writing is an art (at least in its best forms), which, like painting, attempts to recreate and memorialize past realities that are no longer seen or experienced. The historians’ art, if well executed, consists of two principal functions: first, it brings to life that which is dead; and second, it captures in the frame of a still picture that which is a moving picture. In other words, the practice of doing history requires a knowledge and faithful recreation of what happened in the past in thought or deed, but of course it is not a knowledge of everything that happened but only a selective recreation. This means that the practice of history is concerned with truth and its preservation, which means establishing a relationship between a subject (the historian) and reality (the past). This is very hard to do because the past is a foreign place that exists either only in memory (and memory is typically imperfect) or in artifacts from the past. Moreover, our knowledge of the past must necessarily be incomplete. We know, for instance, that on July 1, 1776, John Adams delivered the decisive speech in the Continental Congress arguing for independence, but we do not have any record of the speech or its content, nor do we know what was in the minds of the delegates as they heard it. In both cases, however, the historian can infer what was said and thought based on Adams’s previously published arguments for independence and on the fact that Congress vote in favor of independence three days later.

To complicate matters, history is also concerned with change over time (particularly as it relates to the human experience) and the causes and consequences of change. In these ways, the art and practice of history is deeply philosophical: it is concerned with metaphysics (i.e., the nature of reality but in the past tense) and epistemology (i.e., the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired by the historian). In this way, the historian qua philosopher is very much like Socrates: he seeks to unclutter reality by asking probing questions that help to separate fact from fiction to reveal the truth of past thoughts, actions, and events. Having done that, the difficulty of the historian’s task is compounded by the fact that he must see the past not only as a still picture but as a moving picture as well.

At its best, though, the art of history writing is more than just a recording or remembrance of things past. The art of history writing qua art is necessarily selective, which means that it serves an end or purpose as the criterion of selection. For example, the purpose of nihilistic history (see the 1619 Project) is to tear down and destroy that which is demonstrably good. By contrast, the purpose of what I call the “new moral history” (see the Introduction to America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It) is to promote those values, principles, virtues, and actions that are life-affirming. This requires, of course, that the historian engage in moral and political philosophy to provide some sort of guide or benchmark in determining what is and is not important to select as the subject of one’s narrative. The art of history is concerned with telling a story about the past that may serve or inform the present.

In this way, great or epic history is not only an art form, but it is also a form of moral and political philosophy, the purpose of which is to instruct, edify and improve. In his Letters on the Study and Use of History, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, wrote that “history is philosophy teaching by examples.” Just so. The art and substance of history rightly understood is a form of wisdom, and wisdom is the highest purpose of philosophy. The purpose for studying and writing history was not, according to Bolingbroke, to make men antiquarians, scholars, coxcombs, or pedants. The “true use of history,” he continued, was to teach men how to conduct themselves “in all the situations of private and public life.” To that end, Bolingbroke believed that the practitioners and students of history must apply themselves “to it in a philosophical spirit and manner; that [they] must rise from particular to general knowledge, and that [they] must fit [themselves] for the society and business of mankind by accustoming [their] minds to reflect and meditate, on the characters [they] find described, and the course of events [they] find related there.” The art of history rightly understood and in its highest form is truth-seeking and soul-forming.

America’s revolutionary Founders viewed the purpose of history in exactly this way. They thought character formation and the study of freedom and tyranny to be the highest function of history. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson understood, for instance, that the philosophic value of history is to serve as a laboratory for the study of human nature, particularly its need for freedom as well as its human, all-too-human tendency to corrupt ambition. They believed that American children must be taught to be free and virtuous citizens via a study of the past that values freedom and loathes tyranny. Young Americans and future citizens must be taught the conditions and causes that lead to the rise and fall of both freedom and tyranny. (This view of the importance of history instruction for young people was first enunciated by Socrates in The Republic, when he says in Book II, “the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender[.] For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.”) The art of history is therefore concerned with selecting the ideas, actions, and events from what Bolingbroke (and Jefferson) referred to as the “course of events” and the accumulated experiences of several generations to construct a salutary moral narrative.

The eighteenth-century art of history as moral instruction reached its peak with Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789), which indicated the philosophical necessity of studying the past:

A being of the nature of man, endowed with the same faculties, but with a longer measure of existence, would cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and follies of human ambition, so eager, in a narrow span, to grasp at a precarious and short-lived enjoyment. It is thus that the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view. In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment; the grave is ever beside the throne; the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings, who have passed before our eyes and faintly dwell on our remembrance. The observation that, in every age and climate, ambition has prevailed with the same commanding energy may abate the surprise of a philosopher; but, while he condemns the vanity, he may search the motive, of this universal desire to obtain and hold the sceptre of dominion.

The art of history is a form of philosophy, maybe even the highest form of philosophy. Jefferson—indeed, the entire Founding generation—believed that history is the most important field of philosophic knowledge for a free people. By studying under the light provided by the lamp of experience, men can learn how to be free and moral. And in its highest and best form, the art of history writing is also a form of aesthetic expression that mirrors the qualities of literary style and beauty that we typically associate with the great novelists. Sometimes great history writing is read not so much for the historical information that it conveys but for the beauty of its artistic style as one might read in Dickens or Dostoyevsky. (Think Thucydides, Davila, Hume, Gibbon, Prescott, Churchill, etc.) Likewise, great literature such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three are barely distinguishable from good works of history.

In the essay or two that will follow in the weeks ahead, I shall paint with broad strokes two portraits: one of life in pre-Founding, colonial America and one of life in the post-Founding, antebellum United States. The point is to see what light the former can cast on the latter. I will be, of course, oversimplifying the reality of life during these two centuries, but I do hope to capture the essence of life during these two overlapping historical periods. The ultimate purpose, of course, is to demonstrate how and why the American Founding was revolutionary.

And thus, as Montesquieu said with Correggio, “I too am a painter.”