The New Moral History

My last essay “Thoughts on History” presented a few preliminary thoughts on the philosophy of history, particularly with regard to what I call the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of history. Today’s essay applies those general ideas to the development a new approach to history that I call “the new moral history,” which I first introduced in America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.

I first began to think about and develop the idea of “moral history” in the summer of 2016 when I was just starting to write a book on the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. The revolution is, of course, the most written about subject in American history, and I began with this question: is there anything original left to say about the American Revolution and its causes and meaning? To be clear, I was not interested in writing a book on a tiny, fractional part of the Revolution. My hope, certainly my ambition, was to write something original and capacious that would open new avenues to the Revolution’s deepest causes.

As I was beginning to sketch such a history, I came upon some letters and other writings by John Adams and Thomas Paine that opened a new way of viewing the Revolution and its causes, and which led me to the conclusion that “yes,” something new and original could be said about the Revolution. Here’s what I found.

During his retirement years, John Adams thought a good deal about the meaning of the American Revolution. In a fascinating letter written to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, he asked a simple question: “What do we mean by the Revolution?” Surely not the war, he answered rhetorically. “That was no part of the Revolution,” he declared. The war, he said, “was only an Effect and Consequence” of the Revolution. The true Revolution, he continued, “was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected . . . in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” A few years later, Adams suggested again that the “real American Revolution” was represented by a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of the American people. The former president was suggesting that the root cause of the American Revolution was to be found in a radical change in the colonists’ moral reasoning and political principles. Adams’s comments raise important questions: how and why was the American mind revolutionized in the years before 1776, and, more particularly, what new moral ideas defined America’s emerging revolutionary consciousness? Adams considered these questions “surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity.”

Like Adams, Thomas Paine also understood that a revolutionary transformation had taken place in the American consciousness in the years leading up to 1776. As Paine put it so strikingly in Common Sense, “a new æra for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.” He described this “new method of thinking” in an extraordinary letter to the French philosophe, the Abbé Raynal. Paine told the French cleric that the American “style and manner of thinking ha[d] undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country.” The Americans now see, he explained, “with other eyes; [they] hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those [they] formerly used.” This revolution of the mind transformed the colonists into “another people.” Paine identified the precise meaning of that revolution when he wrote in Rights of Man: “the Independence of America” was “accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.” The Americans had done something, he continued, that no other people in history had ever achieved: they founded their new governments “on a moral theory . . . on the indefeasible, hereditary rights of man.” The discovery, development, and adoption of that “moral theory” by the American people in the years before 1776 is the embodiment of the “real” revolution described by Adams.

But what exactly was this “new method of thinking” and the new “moral theory” associated with the American Revolution? How and why did colonial Americans develop a “moral theory” about the “indefeasible, hereditary rights of man”? And what role did this moral theory play in the coming of the Revolutionaries’ revolution? Specifically, I began to think about how ideas affect motives and events. This was my “ah-ha” moment when I realized that these questions opened new historical vistas from which to view the American Revolution. What follows is a prolegomenon to the core tenets of the new moral history.

Broadly speaking, the new moral history is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in the course of human events. It attempts to explain behavior in given historical contexts by showing the connection between principles and practice in the day-to-day actions and interactions of men and women in a social context. This approach is not simply a history of the development of certain moral theories, although it can be that in part. Its primary goal is to examine the intersection between moral thought and moral action, between what people say and what they do (or don’t do). The new moral history studies the what, why, and how of moral reasoning, and then it looks for the connections with the what, why, and how of moral action. It studies the modes of reasoning and ideas used by individual men and women as they evaluated, judged, and dealt with their social reality, and it examines the alternatives confronted by individuals and groups of individuals as they made decisions about what to do or how to act. It emphasizes thinking, judging, choosing, and acting individuals over large-scale social processes moved by unseen forces.

The new moral history begins with certain assumptions about human nature: first, that individuals are the primary unit of moral value; second, that human nature is knowable and sometimes predictable; third, that man’s faculty of reason can know cause-and-effect relationships in nature and human nature; fourth, that individuals are confronted every day with choices, and that they have the free will to choose between alternatives; fifth, that freely thinking (rationally and irrationally) and freely acting (morally and immorally) individuals are capable of making decisions and acting on them; sixth, that purposive human agents cause events to happen; and finally, that human thought and action can have intended and unintended consequences. This view of human nature suggests that individuals are morally responsible for their decisions and actions and the consequences that follow therefrom. Thus, the new moral history puts the thinking back into ideas, the judgment back into intentions, and the volition back into actions.

The new moral history has the benefit of being compatible with how eighteenth-century Americans saw the nature of reality, truth, causality, human nature, and the processes of historical change. All American Revolutionaries believed that there are moral and political truths—truths absolute, certain, universal, permanent, and immutable—that can be known by reason and acted upon. Such was the purpose of the Declaration of Independence—to declare certain self-evident truths thought to be accessible to all men everywhere. Likewise, in Federalist No. 31, Alexander Hamilton appealed to “certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.” Hamilton and his fellow Americans assumed that human reason was fallible, but they also assumed that the discovery of truth about the most important matters was possible and that by grounding their principles on axiomatic truths, they could “command the assent” of the minds of their fellow Americans. These truths, they believed, could not only be assented to by other Americans, but they believed they could be understood by all men everywhere because they thought these truths transcended their immediate historical situation. The Revolutionary generation viewed these truths as objectively true and not simply as historically conditioned. It is not possible to understand the moral and political thought of America’s Revolutionary generation without knowing and respecting this fact.

Eighteenth-century Americans also assumed that society is made up of autonomous moral agents who define the course of events. Understanding men’s moral principles, their modes of reasoning, their motives, their options, their choices, and their actions was the key to understanding the role of causation in human action and history. They believed that motives explain actions, that moral principles explain motives, and that moral reasoning explains moral principles. And if events are the direct consequence of individual (and group) principles, decisions, intentions, and actions, then it is imperative for historians to study the moral principles, choices, and behaviors of individuals, which, if shared by many or most of the individuals in a society, shapes the general character of a society. In this way, then, a culture with its unique manners and mores reflects the moral character of individuals writ large, which means that historians should be able discern patterns of moral belief and action that may reveal the existence of a common moral culture. Hence the history of human events is, for better or worse, the history of men and women acting according to a conception of what they think is good, right, just, and true.

The new moral history is about discovering the causes of social events in the ideas, motives, and actions of moral agents acting as individuals or as groups. This is precisely how Thomas Dawes, a colonel in the Massachusetts militia, studied and presented the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. In a 1787 Fourth of July oration celebrating American independence, Dawes informed his audience that they were convened “to consider the feelings, manners and principles which led to our Independence—the effects which have flowed, and the consequences that will probably follow, from that great event.” Dawes was, in effect, pursuing the research project described years later by John Adams, which called for examining how and why the American Revolution represented a radical transformation in the “Minds of the People.” For Adams, the war for independence was a consequence of the “radical change” that occurred “in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people” in the decade before independence. Dawes saw the Revolution in the same way. He insisted to his audience that when “contemplating the principles which originated” or caused the war and the Revolution, they must “not confound them with the occasions that only ripened, our Independence.” For Dawes, moral principles inspire actions, which in turn create events. The primary moral principle that motivated colonial Americans to act and therefore caused the Revolution, according to Dawes, was their recognition of and dedication to the principle that their “liberties are founded on the broad basis of everlasting justice.” Their reaction to the Stamp Act, he argued, was grounded in moral principle, moral judgment, and moral action. The colonists were dedicated to a certain conception of justice, which inspired them to act when they saw it being violated by British imperial officials. To understand why American Revolutionaries acted in the ways they did, we must begin by understanding their conception of justice and what it meant to them.

This common view of the underlying cause of the American Revolution rested upon an even deeper view of human nature and moral agency. According to the Bostonian John Perkins writing in 1771, men have “absolute liberty,” which means “a person has been supposed capable of determining differently, all circumstances remaining the same.” By “[m]oral freedom,” Perkins “meant a power of determining according to apprehended good and evil; opposed to a state of moral necessity, either natural, or induced by long custom, habit, passion, or some special depravity.” Moral historians take seriously the principle that “[a]ll appearances evidence that man was form’d for self-direction; since by his intellectual judgment; disengage himself from prejudices; foresee events, and conduct accordingly.” The following year, Stephen West bolstered Perkin’s view of moral action by affirming the cause-and-effect relationship between moral judgment and moral action: “If every moral event hath an answerable cause on which it is dependent for its existence; then all moral events come into existence under the influence of their several causes—an influence which is previous to the event and extrinsic of it, and with which the event is certainly connected.” These assumptions lay behind the revolution in American moral thought and action during the second half of the eighteenth century, and they provide a window through which we can see the deepest causes of the Revolution.

How and why, then, shall historians go about discovering the objective reality and meaning of past thought and action?

Historical objectivity refers to a relationship between a subject and an object. It occurs when a subject (the historian) interacts with and accurately re-presents past thoughts, actions, or events (the object). The most difficult part of this process is to uncover the reasons behind past actions. The act of doing history always begins in the present. It starts with a historian who wants to know something about some person(s), idea(s), action(s), or event(s) in the past. The historians’ craft is an act of recovery and reenactment. It seeks, first, to recover the objective truth about the what, when, how, and why of past thought and action, and then it reenacts that recovered knowledge in the form of a narrative story. This task presupposes that scholars be motivated by more than an antiquarian interest in a particular historical subject; they must be inspired by a sincere if not a passionate sense of curiosity and a desire to know the truth about past thoughts and actions as well as their possible relevance for the present.

History’s secrets can be revealed when historians ask probing questions of past thinkers and actors in order to reproduce their thoughts, motives, and actions. Scholars must first determine which questions were uppermost in the minds of their subjects and why their subjects were compelled to ask and answer them in the way they did. At a deeper level, the moral historian will ask: What did person X who wrote, said, or did Y mean by it? In other words, why did the subject under investigation write, say, or do some particular thing?

To answer these questions, the historians’ craft requires, as we have said, epistemological modesty: it seeks to understand the thought and action of past thinkers and actors in the context of their own self-understanding. It should not superimpose on past thought and action present-day epistemological assumptions about how ideas work, which means it should not assume that the thought of the present is superior to that of the past. In fact, true historical sensitivity and objectivity means beginning with a kind of naïve wonder, which means opening oneself up to the possibility that we might actually have something to learn from past thought, and, even more shockingly, that past thought could even be superior to that of the present.

The new moral history recognizes that authors past, present, and future are responsible for the thoughts they think and the words they write. It seeks to understand particular events by examining the ends and means available to and chosen (or rejected) by historical actors in a given place and time. This requires of historians that they attempt to enter the minds of past thinkers and actors, to the best of their ability, in order to see the world as their subjects saw it, to see the problems, questions, challenges, alternatives, and choices that motivated them to think and act as they did. This means attempting to view a past world from the inside out, that is, from the perspective of the particular thinker or actor. Intellectual historians must attempt to see the world through the author’s eyes, to hear with his or her ears, and to think with and through the author’s mind. We must follow, study, and contemplate the logic and argument of a text or speech. We must attempt to understand to the best of our ability what James Otis, Daniel Dulany, Richard Bland, John Dickinson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and scores of others from the Revolutionary generation thought and said. Only by first understanding what they thought or said can we know why past actors thought, spoke, or acted as they did.

By this method, we can achieve or come close to achieving historical objectivity, which is knowledge of what, when, how, and most importantly, why past events happened. Answering the “why” question is the great challenge of American Revolutionary historians, but to address it in a meaningful way we must confront the problem of intention and motivation directly, which is the lynchpin between theory and practice. We must seek to recover the intentions of those historical actors who participated in the train of events before and after 1776. This takes us into the world of moral reasoning, ideas, principles, motivations, intentions, and actions. But how can we know why certain individuals acted as they did? To answer this question, scholars must go in search of historical evidence to recreate a scene or moment of human action (which includes thinking). Such evidence includes written documents, which typically means treatises, essays, pamphlets, sermons, speeches, diaries, letters, petitions, remonstrances etc. from the period or individuals under examination. Historians must then read and attempt to understand the content, argument, and purposes of these texts as the author or speaker understood them. Documents must be read carefully and reread. To discover the motives of people who lived hundreds of years ago requires tireless research, reading, reconstruction, and thinking.

The new moral history recognizes that “ideas have consequences” and oftentimes intended consequences, but it must also be capacious enough in its methodological scope to recognize the complex interactions of human thought and action from multiple angles or perspectives. The most advanced and sophisticated form of moral history recognizes that ideas inspire actions and actions create events, and events in turn inspire new ideas and actions that may be different from those that inspired them in the first instance. In other words, the realm of ideas evolves and interacts with the realm of action in a dialectical relationship and where the outcomes can be different than those originally intended. Human interaction is complex and therefore history is not simply linear; it is not always an issue of individuals making choices and acting on them. Thus the new moral history takes seriously the role of contingency in human affairs. It recognizes that decisions and actions could have turned out other than they did; that certain ideas, choices, decisions, and actions carried out in different contexts can have very different results; that good ideas and good intentions can sometimes have deleterious consequences different from those intended. When ideas (true or false, good or bad) are translated into action, they can have intended and unintended consequences, some of which are short term and some long term.

Thus, the new moral history must capture the conflict of visions, choices, and actions that exists between individuals and within societies. The simple fact is all individuals must make choices between alternatives all the time, and sometimes those choices come into conflict with one another. In the context of the American Revolution, there was conflict between Great Britain and her American colonies, between American Patriots and Loyalists, between more radical and more conservative Patriots, and then between even the most radical revolutionaries. And not only was there conflict between individuals or groups of individuals, but there was also conflict (and sometimes paralysis) within the minds of each individual person as they confronted difficult choices on innumerable issues. One can see these kinds of internal tensions in the thought of reluctant Revolutionaries, such as a James Otis and John Dickinson. To grasp the wholeness of the Revolution, to understand its full depth and breadth, requires an examination of the arguments, choices, and actions of a wide spectrum of contending views. At the very least, one should assume that the principles, choices, and actions of the Loyalists and George III were just as real and just as sincere as those of the Patriots. This is why a moral history of the American Revolution from the Loyalist perspective is needed just as much as one from the Patriot perspective. Both sides must be understood if we are to fully understand the nature and meaning of the Revolution.

The new moral history therefore recognizes and brings to life the drama and sometimes the comedy and tragedy of the human condition. It acknowledges that individuals make decisions in the face of doubt and errors of knowledge. It recognizes and takes into account ambiguity, contradiction, accidents, and anomalies. There is almost always some uncertainty in human affairs because individuals have incomplete knowledge or information. The Revolutionary generation knew this fact about human nature. In the 37^th essay of The Federalist, James Madison noted that the incompleteness and uncertainty of human knowledge is grounded in three deficiencies associated with human cognition: first, the “indistinctness of the object” under examination; second, the “imperfection of the organ of conception”; and, third, the “inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas.” A veil of obscurity between subject and object makes certain knowledge difficult, and the transference of that knowledge from one person to another only compounds the problem. Madison informs his audience that developing political concepts that are true (i.e., that reflect reality as it is) and then accurately conveying and receiving those concepts from one person to another is one of the great challenges of the human condition. The discovery and transmission of moral and political truth is inherently fraught with error given man’s nature. Madison thought this fact of the human condition was the greatest source of conflict between individuals and groups of individuals. Historians face the very same problem described by Madison: the eighteenth-century objects they study are indistinct, the historians’ organ of conception is fallible, and the vehicle by which historians transmit their historical recreations is imperfect. This is why the historians’ craft calls for epistemological modesty.

The new moral history also recognizes that different individuals work on different levels of consciousness. Not all thinkers or ideas are equal. Some individuals operate at the highest level of conscious awareness, some are middling thinkers, and some follow their unconscious passions, opinions, and interests. Some ideas are innovative, brilliant and influential, while some are banal, quickly forgotten, or never even noticed. Thomas Paine, America’s best-known democratic theorist, knew that there was a hierarchy of wisdom and influence when it came to explaining the causes of the American Revolution. He knew that not all Americans could make the sophisticated and nuanced arguments of James Otis, John Adams, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton. In his Letter to the Abbé Raynal in 1782, Paine noted that in response to the Stamp Act every American “had a right to give his opinion; and there were many, who with the best intentions, did not choose the best, nor indeed the true ground, to defending their cause.” Ordinary men “felt themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to separate, analyze, and arrange the parts.” The truth is—a truth confirmed by daily experience—that a few individuals live by a self-generated, consciously chosen, and rational process of thought, while most others absorb subconsciously the dominant ideas of their culture.

The new moral history likewise acknowledges that there is a hierarchy of influence in society. The ideas and actions of some individuals have the power to motivate and influence hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals in ways that the ideas and actions of others do not. Moreover, some thinkers and writers are original and ahead of their time, while others are distinguished for summing up the dominant ideas of their time. The hierarchy of influence is also connected to actions as well. Some individuals are leaders, and some are followers. Some have skills and abilities that others do not. The fact is that some individuals did more to bring about the Revolution or to bring it to a successful conclusion than others. For instance, the fiery speeches of Patrick Henry, the organizing skills of Samuel Adams, the moral leadership of George Washington, the constitutional arguments of John Adams, the rhetorical brilliance of Thomas Paine, the financial acumen of Robert Morris, the tactical genius of General Nathanael Greene, and the literary style of Thomas Jefferson commanded a greater degree of respect and influence than did the abilities of others.

Finally, the new moral history recognizes that some ideas are true and some are false, some are wise and some are foolish, and some are good and some are bad, which means they can and should be judged by the historian. It is a historical truism that past thinkers and actors almost always viewed their own ideas as right and therefore true and those of their opponents as wrong and therefore false. The Loyalists thought they were right and the Patriots wrong, just as the Anti-Federalists thought they were right and the Federalists wrong. It seems fitting, then, for historians to test, evaluate, and judge how past actors understood the truth of their ideas and actions. The most interesting kind of history recaptures first the intellectual and then the political and social clash of two or more contending opinions about the most important questions. This means that historians must be open to the possibility that one or the other position in any past dispute was right and therefore true and the other wrong and therefore untrue, or that both positions could be wrong. The historian must also confront, observe, evaluate, and judge actions relative to the ideas that inform the behavior of past actors. If military historians can judge (and they do) some strategic or tactical decisions to be “brilliant” or “disastrous,” then it seems reasonable that intellectual historians should be able to judge moral or political ideas to be true or false, good or bad, just or unjust. The new moral history must not be a value-free social science, but, to be clear, neither should it engage in vulgar moralism or moral self-righteousness. The historian’s first responsibility is to recreate the past as it happened. Then and only then, can he or she render judgment on past thought and action. Scholars of the American Revolution should be neither scientists nor preachers. Their moral evaluation of past thought and action should be fair and balanced and conducted with great care and caution.

Consider the battle of ideas between American Revolutionaries and British imperial officials. At its core, this debate was not primarily about taxes or representation; it was about the nature of justice and right. American Revolutionaries acted on the assumption that their principles of justice and right were true (objectively, absolutely, and self-evidently true), whereas the British viewed their principles of justice and right as historically true relative to time and place. At the deepest philosophical level, the great point of contention between these two sides concerned the nature of truth itself. On some level, these competing viewpoints can and should be evaluated and judged by historians. This does not mean, however, that historians can or should be partisans for one side or another, nor does it mean that historians should anachronistically judge the past as the means by which to judge the present. The fact is that elements of truth and falsity, good and evil, justice and injustice can exist on two sides in a debate or war, particularly if it is a fratricidal debate or war. In examining the debates between American Whigs and British imperial officials or American Patriots and Loyalists or Federalists and Anti-Federalists, it is entirely proper for historians to assess and judge the power, depth, originality, influence, and, ultimately, the truthfulness of an argument. It is entirely appropriate for historians to analyze past ideas, principles, intentions, motives, and actions, and then judge them as true or false, good or bad, always recognizing that the historical loser of a political contest might very well have had the truer argument. The new moral history welcomes studies that examine and evaluate—even positively—Loyalist political thought and action or the decisions of George III. The standards by which historians judge ideas and actions as true or false, good or bad, just or unjust should be stated openly and clearly. Their standard of judgment should likewise be open to evaluation and criticism.

In the end, the new moral history has the added advantage of providing a life-enhancing incentive to those who study history. History matters precisely because ideas matter. We study past thought and action to learn from it, to be guided by it, and to provide models of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Thus, the study of history is primarily a humanistic and not a scientific enterprise, one that can be, and in many ways should be, restored as a branch of philosophy. Indeed, the pursuit of historical truth is a form of philosophical inquiry. As John Adams learned from Bolingbroke and Bolingbroke from Dionysius Halicarnassus and Dionysius from Thucydides, history rightly understood is “philosophy teaching by examples.” History is philosophy’s handmaiden, or maybe it’s the other way ‘round! The value-free approach to history advocated by most historians has very little to teach us in the present other than as a quaint, antiquarian curiosity. The new moral history, by contrast, can help us to recover our past to better serve our present and future.

**A reminder to readers: please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.