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April, 2007
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The Nation Is Already There


Robin L. Einhorn


IN his ambitious and challenging essay, Jack P. Greene proposes to enlist colonial historians on a mission to conquer (or colonize) the national history of the United States. The research of colonial historians, he explains, is being marginalized in the "textbook" accounts of American history precisely because of the field's virtues.1 The leading virtue of research in colonial history, according to Greene, is its abandonment of a teleological narrative that shoehorns the diverse local histories of colonial societies into an anachronistic prehistory of the United States. Greene then enlists two bodies of theory to suggest strategies for recasting the national period in the colonial mold: postcolonial theory that has begun to include the histories of settler colonies and state-making theory that portrays early modern states and empires as contingent efforts to extend control over particular (and particularistic) peoples and territories. 1
      Greene's explication of the virtues of early American history resembles the one Joyce E. Chaplin has framed in a similar manifesto. This praise is deserved, and William and Mary Quarterly readers will be aware of Greene's role in helping to build such a strong field. Yet the curious thing about these manifestos is that Greene and Chaplin seem to conceive of historical research as a kind of competition among field-based teams in which each tries to compel the others to adopt its own terms of inquiry. Where Chaplin urges historians of early America to abandon the parochial exceptionalism of U.S. history to influence debates in theory and cultural studies ("leaving their mark on an important conversation about the global fate of modern empires and colonized peoples"), Greene wants to mobilize the insights of colonial history to liberate U.S. history itself.2 2
      As a U.S. historian who works mainly in the nineteenth century, I am not sure whether I would rather be abandoned by Chaplin or liberated by Greene. Nor do I think that scholarship works (or should work) as a field-based competition. It ought to be—and actually is—an open-ended conversation among scholars who apply various research strategies to various historical problems. Greene seems to take particular issue with nineteenth-century historians who stray into colonial materials to find precedents that shaped the national period. He is right to point out that nineteenth-century historians often find colonial histories "useful principally for the light they shed on emergent national institutions and cultures," but this is because the research interests of nineteenth-century historians lie in the effort to explain these national institutions and cultures. Colonial historians (like national historians) should adopt the frames of reference that are most appropriate for their own research. For this reason, Greene is clearly justified in rejecting an "exclusively prenational" focus for colonial history.3 By the same token, however, colonial history is prenational when the nation is the object of study. 3
      But Greene thinks historians of the national period pay "a huge price" for this view, since it blinds them to the critical insights that the colonial literature has produced. Early American historians, Greene argues, "have been at the forefront of the effort" to study the Indians, Africans, and other subaltern groups who once were "neglected in the construction of grand narratives" of national history. They have also pioneered the study of colonialism, a process that "actually intensified with the colonization of vast new areas of the continent" in the nineteenth century. Because early American historians understand the decentralized character of American state building, their "localist perspective should be extended into the national era" to persuade national-era historians that "the spread of settlement probably had more to do with the needs, desires, and self-understandings of individual settlers and promoters than with national goals such as manifest destiny."4 4
      Nineteenth-century historians can endorse Greene's empirical claims about the nineteenth century: the significance of Indians, Africans, and other subaltern groups; the continuity between pre- and postrevolutionary colonialism (westward expansion); and the decentralized character of nineteenth-century state building. His call to think about the colonial and national periods as a continuous story with similar themes is appropriate. Nineteenth-century historians might quibble with the "merely" in the following sentence while agreeing that Greene has it right: "National expansion merely represented an extension of colonial expansion with a weak American state, instead of a weak British state, presiding over it."5 5
      The reason this agreement comes so easily is that the colonial- and national-era literatures actually have developed more as a conversation than a competition. Scholarship on the Revolution itself sometimes exaggerates the radicalism of its break between a colonial past and a national future, but the larger literature on the early Republic is much more similar to the colonial-era literature than Greene suggests. And it is similar precisely because scholarship in American history has developed as a conversation among scholars who read each other's work and think about its implications for their own studies. Greene recognizes this ongoing conversation in his description of the social history revolution. Though he asserts colonial-era leadership, he is at least willing to acknowledge that national-era colleagues joined in the larger effort "to reverse the traditional neglect of women, children, Amerindians, African Americans, people of mixed race, ethnic minorities, and socioeconomic subaltern groups." Yet Greene makes no such concessions in his gloss on nineteenth-century political history. He thinks that nineteenth-century political historians have neglected "the states as the arenas in which most governance, most public life, and the domestic life of most Americans were principally centered."6 This statement is simply not true. The principal themes and findings of nineteenth-century political history actually have emerged from state and local studies for generations. 6
      Starting with Greene's social history argument, it is probably fair to say that colonial-era historians have had the edge in Native American history but not in community-based new social history more generally. John Demos's A Little Commonwealth, Philip J. Greven Jr.'s Four Generations, and Kenneth A. Lockridge's A New England Town all came out in 1970, but it is hard to see how they were more influential as opening salvos of the new social history movement than Stephan Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress, which came out in 1964. If the colonial historian can cite Charles S. Grant's Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent, from 1961, the national historian can answer with Merle Curti's The Making of an American Community, from 1959. There was a lot of great colonial social history in the 1970s and early 1980s, but the same period produced Alan Dawley's Class and Community, Paul E. Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium, and Mary P. Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class. Surely, it does not detract from scholarly appreciation of Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom to notice the influence of John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community and Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll, not least on colonial historians. And if early Americanists are celebrating comparative and cross-cultural research, is there anything in the colonial-era literature that rivals Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor?7 7
      With regard to the history of nineteenth-century westward expansion, it may not be too much to say that all the most important literature focuses on the state and local levels, including when the subject is state building. The pioneering research—in the 1930s—of Paul Wallace Gates on the Northwest and Thomas Perkins Abernethy on the Southwest built frameworks that have endured in studies such as John Mack Faragher's Sugar Creek, Andrew R. L. Cayton's The Frontier Republic, Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats's Washington County, Stephen Aron's How the West Was Lost, and Susan E. Gray's The Yankee West, to name only a few of the important monographs. It is not at all clear what Greene has in mind when he describes this literature as focused on "national goals such as manifest destiny." In fact "the needs, desires, and self-understandings of individual settlers and promoters" have dominated this literature for decades.8 8
      More generally, the modern study of antebellum political history was literally built from state and local research. It is no accident that Richard P. McCormick's The Second American Party System consisted of state-level chapters, but consider this list of other influential works: Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth; Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy; Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era; Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties and The Transformation of Political Culture; J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic; and Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism. Nor does this trend show any sign of abating. It is not necessary to keep listing books to agree that political historians of the national period notice the decentralized structure of the American polity and the importance of state-level state building. The great national personalities (Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and so on) have attracted more than their fair share of attention, but whether the focus has been electoral politics, institutional design, or legal development, the political history of the early nineteenth century has long been what Greene wants it to be: "a genuinely federal history" that "recognize[s] the states' centrality."9 9
      Greene is probably right that the textbook version of national (and colonial) history often neglects the diversity of local experience to build a single national narrative. But he is not right about the discipline's version of the history of the national period. If colonial historians approach national historians with peaceful intentions, the traditionally fruitful scholarly conversations will continue. If they enlist in Greene's mission to conquer the national period, however, they will encounter a dense and well-organized native population as wary of imperialistic designs as the Indians who met settlers on colonial frontiers. 10


      Robin L. Einhorn is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She would like to thank Jason Scott Smith and Jennifer Spear.


Notes

1 Jack P. Greene, "Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 249.

2 Joyce E. Chaplin, "Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History," Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March 2003): 1431–55 (quotation, 1433). See also Joyce Appleby's description of the project of colonial history since the 1960s as an effort to "stop playing pedestal to the Revolution's statue" (Appleby, "A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America," WMQ 50, no. 2 [April 1993]: 264); Gordon S. Wood, "The Relevance and Irrelevance of American Colonial History," in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Wood (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 144–63.

3 Greene, WMQ 64: 235, 239. For my own trespassing into colonial materials, deeply indebted to the conversation with colonial historians but located squarely in the prenational framework, see Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006), chaps. 1–3.

4 Greene, WMQ 64: 235, 239–40, 246–47.

5 Ibid., 246. Note, however, that this view of a weak national state has been contested. See Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Jeffrey L. Pasley, "Midget on Horseback: American Indians and the Historiography of the American State," paper presented at the Policy History Conference, Charlottesville, Va., June 2, 2006.

6 Greene, WMQ 64: 248.

7 For social history community studies, see Merle Curti, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (Stanford, Calif., 1959); Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York, 1961); Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981). For slavery studies, see John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). These lists obviously are small samplings from large literatures.

8 Greene, WMQ 64: 247. For the early work, see Thomas Perkins Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1932); Paul Wallace Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1934); Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier: Studies in American Land Policy (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973). More recent studies include Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, Ohio, 1986); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, Conn., 1986); Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats, Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 1995); Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996); Susan E. Gray, The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

9 Greene, WMQ 64: 249. For the early studies of state-level state building, see Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York, 1947); Harry N. Scheiber, "Government and the Economy: Studies of the 'Commonwealth' Policy in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 135–51. See also Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, N.J., 1961); Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966); Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861 (Athens, Ohio, 1969); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, N.J., 1971); J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1978); Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984); Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York, 1988). On subnational state building, see also Peter Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987); L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago, 1991); Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001). For legal history, see esp. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985); William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

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