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i
Rethinking America
•
ii
iii
Rethinking
America
•
FROM EMPIRE TO REPUBLIC
John M. Murrin
with an introduction by
Andrew Shankman
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© John M. Murrin 2018

Introduction © Oxford University Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–503871–2
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
In fond memory of Edmund S. Morgan

vi
vi
Cont ents
•
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Andrew Shankman
Introduction—The Revolutionary Republic of a Radical, Imperial,

Whig: The Historical and Historiographical Imagination
of John M. Murrin 1
Andrew Shankman
Part I. An Overview
1. The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison
of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721)
and America (1776–1816) 31
Part II. Toward Revolution

2. No Awakening, No Revolution? More
Counterfactual Speculations 101
3. The French and Indian War, the American Revolution,
and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence
Henry Gipson and John Shy 115
vii
vi
viii Contents
4. Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American

Revolution Considered as a Social Accident
(with Rowland Berthoff ) 131
5. 1776: The Countercyclical Revolution 161
Part III. Defining the Republic

6. A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American
National Identity 187
7. Fundamental Values, the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution 205
8. The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class
(with Gary J. Kornblith) 239
9. Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the
Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America 295
10. War, Revolution, and Nation-Making: The American
Revolution versus the Civil War 343
Conclusion—Self-Immolation: Schools of Historiography

and the Coming of the American Revolution 383
ix
Pr eface and Ack nowledgm ents

Andrew Shankman
•
I arrived at Princeton University in the summer of 1992 for my first
semester of graduate school, equally eager and overwhelmed to study with
John Murrin. One of my undergraduate professors, Stephen Foster, had
known Murrin since their days at Yale working with Edmund Morgan.
Another, Allan Kulikoff, had been Murrin’s colleague at Princeton for
several years. A third, Simon Newman, had been Murrin’s student. And
a fourth, Alfred F. Young, doubted Murrin’s political commitments,
but confirmed what the other three said: that Murrin seemed to know
everything. Murrin was, Young told me, co-writing an essay for the vol-
ume Young was currently editing, an essay that Young assured me was
stunning.1 Murrin, it seemed, fit well the description his Ph.D. adviser
Morgan had provided for Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College from 1778
to 1795: he was “a monstrous warehouse of knowledge” exhibiting “so
much energy in the sheer joy of learning.”2
That spring I had first sensed another equally important quality
of John Murrin’s when I read a brief note he had written to Kulikoff
and had enclosed with the final volume of the biographical dictionary
Princetonians. Princetonians ran to five volumes, published between 1976
and 1991, and covered the years 1748 to 1794. Murrin’s name appears
nowhere as an editor. Yet he devoted a great deal of time to the project
due to his deep interest in the history of the university where he worked
ix
x
x Preface and Acknowledgments
for over thirty years, and because of his devotion to the memory and leg-
acy of Princeton’s previous early Americanist, Wesley Frank Craven. The
note, to the best of my memory, read “Dear Allan, here is the latest vol-
ume of Princetonians. I expect you to read every word. John. P.S. Andrew
Shankman is on the admit list.” And so, my life changed forever. As I tried
to absorb the note in a hallway outside a classroom, I could concentrate
enough to realize that it was a humorous little letter. It was funny, while
also being ingenuously modest, self-deprecating, and a little bit impish.
As I would come to know, Murrin is joyful both in learning and
mischief. Though Morgan’s quotation captures Murrin as well as it
does Stiles, equally revealing is a brief passage from one of Murrin’s
essays in Rethinking America, “No Awakening, No Revolution? More
Counterfactual Speculations.” It is one of the two essays in the volume that
are organized around a counterfactual question, a very difficult exercise
to do well, and one at which Murrin excels. In “No Awakening” Murrin
expunges the first Great Awakening from history to assess what differ-
ence that would make for the coming of the American Revolution. The
only way to erase the Awakening is to provide plausible explanations for
the disappearances of George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert
Tennant before they could cause any serious trouble. By imprisoning
Whitfield in a Spanish dungeon during the War of Jenkin’s Ear, reducing
Edwards to a permanent catatonic stupor, and killing off Tennant with
a bolt of lightning (after all, who didn’t know that Tennant was struck
by lightning in 1745 but survived?), Murrin dispatched the three with
wholehearted glee, explaining that it was “one of the forbidden delights
that such counterfactual musings can provide to any suitably degener-
ate mind.” Combining these Morgan and Murrin quotations brings one
closer to knowing Murrin for those who have not met him.
Within days of arriving at Princeton, I had heard about the collected
essays project. My fellow Murrin students (there were always many)
explained that he had written far more essays than I realized, over forty,
possibly more than fifty. Nobody seemed to know for sure, because some
of the best were published in obscure hard-to-find volumes, and some
of the very best were still in a drawer somewhere. I remember wanting
access to that drawer. But I was not to give up hope, for Murrin had a
contract with Oxford University Press and would be publishing his col-
lected essays in two volumes, or was it three? There was spirited debate
xi
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
about that and the details were hazy. But it was coming soon, quite soon,
and the erudition of this monstrous warehouse of knowledge would be
widely available. I remember that summer telling somebody that I hoped
it would all happen in time for my general exams.
Twenty three years after passing those exams, for me it is a momen-
tous occasion and an enormous pleasure to help make widely available
eleven of John Murrin’s essential essays treating the American Revolution
and the early American Republic. Rethinking America addresses essential
questions and controversies that have long shaped our understanding of
the nation’s origins and that should continue to inform the discussions
of current and future historians. In doing so, these essays deeply probe
themes and issues that are central to the surprising, awe-inspiring, and
often deeply troubling formation and development of the United States.
I am grateful to Anthony Grafton and William Chester Jordan of
Princeton University, Daniel K. Richter of the McNeil Center for
Early American Studies and the University of Pennsylvania, and David
Waldstreicher of the CUNY Graduate Center, who read my introduc-
tion and helped me with their encouragement to improve it. I also thank
Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press, who remained devoted to
Rethinking America and who imagined that I could be of use to its com-
pletion. And above all, my enduring thanks to my adviser and friend John
Murrin, the author of the feast.
Notes
1. The essay, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,” is
included in this volume.
2. Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 134.
xi
xi
Rethinking America
•
xvi
1
i nt roduct ion
•
The Revolutionary Republic
of a Radical, Imperial, Whig
The Historical and Historiographical
Imagination of John M. Murrin
Andrew Shankman
The essays collected in Rethinking America introduce many of the

preoccupations that have shaped John Murrin’s scholarly life. Foremost
among them is his central insight, which he called Anglicization. The proc-
ess of Anglicization demonstrates that during the first six decades of the
eighteenth century the thirteen colonies, in virtually every measurable
way—politically, socially, culturally, and economically—became more not
less British in their attitudes, outlooks, and actions, and became more fully,
willingly, and profitably integrated into the British Empire. As many of the
essays in Rethinking America treating the years before 1776 show, the colo-
nists, particularly those higher in the social order, proudly embraced a British
identity. They believed they were British subjects fully deserving of the liber-
ties they associated with the post-1688 limited constitutional monarchy. Due
to their Britishness, they could conclude in the 1760s and 1770s that they
should not be subjected to the treatment imperial policymakers were forcing
them to endure.
Anglicization is Murrin’s overarching insight concerning the revo-
lutionary period, but it is connected to several other issues and ques-
tions the essays in Rethinking America explore. Among them are: the
origins and nature of American federalism; the long success and then
sudden spectacular failure and collapse of the British Empire; the colo-
nial origins of class conflict, and the continued impact and significance
1
2
2 Rethinking America
of social and economic inequality in the early republic; and the great
gulf between outcome and intention produced by those who sought a
republic, created a democracy, and talked in bold ways about expanding
liberty and equality.
To explore these themes, and to bring them together in a coherent
whole, Murrin begins where Edmund Morgan insisted historians should
start, by paying careful attention to how the people of the past explained
what they were doing and why they thought it mattered. On numerous
occasions Murrin has described his excitement about making the move in
the 1950s from the Midwest to Yale to study with Morgan. He was stimu-
lated by Morgan’s fresh approach to the revolutionary period to treat the
ideas and convictions of that era as respectfully as his own mentor Perry
Miller had taught him to treat the ideas of the Puritans.
Yet like Morgan, Murrin knew it was not a simple prospect to listen
to what people of the past said. Statements of the past have a tricky way
of being false friends, as Murrin explained in “The French and Indian
War, The American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis,”
which is included in Rethinking America. In this essay Murrin demol-
ishes the claim that defeat of the French in North America in 1763
directly caused the colonists to seek independence. Historians had
long argued that no longer needing to fear the French was the key rea-
son for the movement for independence. In “The French and Indian
War” Murrin quoted many eighteenth-century statements that insisted
that the colonists would seek independence if the French should ever
be defeated. As a result, Murrin wrote, “because the empire did col-
lapse not long after the Peace of Paris, historians ever alert for an apt
quotation” built arguments on these statements, “endowed them with
prophetic power” since they were “neatly lodged in the sources them-
selves,” and so gravely misunderstood the primary causes of the imperial
crisis due to the entirely understandable and “unexceptionable device of
quoting what they read.”
Murrin’s scholarship is shaped by letting the sources guide him and
by taking seriously the statements of his subjects. Yet he was not misled
by these particular statements, because his understanding of the imperial
crisis and the world it produced was part of his vast and deep knowl-
edge of the English-speaking world of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. That understanding allowed him to see the ways in which the
3
Introduction 3
American Revolutionary era and the Early Republic were shaped by the
colonial period and the British imperial system of which the thirteen
colonies were such a vital part. To possess the context to explore the
main themes of the essays in Rethinking America necessitates spending
some time in the earlier colonial period. To understand the American
Revolution and the Early Republic requires gaining a fuller understand-
ing of the British colonial and British imperial world from which they
emerged.
It is becoming less and less common for scholars to achieve mastery
of both the colonial period and the eras of the American Revolution and
the Early American Republic. But Murrin’s scholarship on the history
of British North America before 1750 shows how essential it is to resist
treating the American Revolution as a dividing line. In over two dozen
essays treating the colonial era, Murrin has shown that in their origins the
North American English colonies participated in a sustained seventeenth-
century conversation about how best to order political and social relations
in the Anglophone early modern world. Over the course of the seven-
teenth century, what England was and should be was hotly contested. The
conflicts were driven by heated disagreements about how best to order
and structure Crown/Parliament relations and by bitter divisions among
the varieties of English Protestantism. These arguments could overwhelm
the realm when constitutional conflicts (which were further intensified
by chronic fiscal crisis and the challenge of governing multiple kingdoms)
overlapped with religions tensions—which happened with increasing fre-
quency after the start of the Thirty Years War in 1618.1
Most of the English North American colonies were founded by groups
that were actively participating in these English conflicts. The non-separat-
ing Congregationalists of Massachusetts hoped to push the early Stuart
church into a much greater assault on church hierarchy. In the Restoration
period, the Duke of York (the future James II) sought to use New York to
provide an example of a purer and more vital form of Absolutism to moti-
vate his brother Charles II to improve on the anemic English version. In
Pennsylvania William Penn hoped to show that the surviving remnant
of the countercultural values of the Civil War and Interregnum could
still be the basis for a more just and edifying society. And in Carolina the
Earl of Shaftesbury and his secretary John Locke tried to fuse the talents
of a patriotic landed aristocracy with the cutting-edge social theory of the
4
Civil War–era thinker James Harrington. They did so to provide an alter-

native to the absolutism advocated by the Duke of York that they feared
would influence the king and to the disruptive upheaval associated with
the Interregnum.2 Each of these colonial experiments represented a pos-
ition on the seventeenth-century English political spectrum. Yet all were
marginal or controversial in England when their adherents resorted to try-
ing them in America. Each of the experiments—dissenting Protestantism
in Massachusetts, unadulterated Absolutism in New York, the remnant of
Civil War–era counterculture in Pennsylvania, and the early expression of
Whig political thought and country ideology in Carolina—hoped to show
how English institutions ought to function and to reconstitute English
society and politics to more closely follow each colony’s example.
Murrin has suggested that a practical definition of “American” in the
English colonies was the determination to dissent from English prac-
tices or values, to depart from, or actively reject, or critique and seek to
transform whatever the mainstream practices of England happened to
be at the time of a colonist’s opposition. By this definition the English
colonies were at their most “American” in the seventeenth century. The
exception to this version of a distinct “American” identity was Virginia.
After its royal takeover in 1624, it alone among the seventeenth-cen-
tury English colonies sought to re-create the political institutions of the
English mainstream. Yet in the final decades of the seventeenth century
(or in Carolina’s case the early eighteenth) all of these colonies, including
Virginia, suffered acute crisis and nearly collapsed. In the first decades
of the eighteenth century no English colony was confident that its past
experiences could provide useful guidance for how to build a stable soci-
ety. This period of crisis began with King Philip’s War in Massachusetts
and Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in the mid-1670s, which were fol-
lowed by the upheaval of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, Leisler’s
Rebellion in New York, the Keithian Schism in Pennsylvania, the Plant
Cutters’ Rebellion in Virginia in the 1680s and 1690s, and finally the
Yamasee War in Carolina in 1715, which almost engulfed the colony.
In descending into crisis mostly at the end of the seventeenth century,
the colonies contributed to a general crisis in the English-speaking world.
The colonial crises coincided with the dismantling of the Restoration
settlement in England as a result of the Exclusion Crisis, the Popish Plot,
the Rye House Plot, and Monmouth’s Rebellion in the 1670s and 1680s,
5
Introduction 5
and finally the Glorious Revolution and the creation of the limited-
constitutional monarchy, beginning in 1689.3 For Murrin, the simul-
taneity of the transatlantic crises was essential for understanding why
the eighteenth-century British colonies were so different from their
seventeenth-century pasts. Between 1689 and the 1720s the Glorious
Revolution and the limited-constitutional monarchy and fiscal-military
state it enabled began to fundamentally resolve the conflicts over Crown/
Parliament relations and among the varieties of English Protestantism that
had plagued the seventeenth century.
As Murrin discusses in “The Great Inversion, Or Court Versus Country:
A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and
America (1776–1816),” included in this volume, the British state and soci-
ety that developed by the 1720s offered a far more attractive and impressive
prospect than the seventeenth-century Stuart state or than any of the sev-
enteenth-century “American” colonial experiments. Britain was becoming
capable of mobilizing considerable resources and projecting its will out-
ward as never before. Just as it was becoming able to, in Murrin’s phrase,
“discover its colonies” by enforcing its Navigation Acts and structuring
and governing an empire, the colonies it was discovering were looking for
alternatives to the ideas and practices that had brought them all to crisis.4
Liberty, property, prosperity, and Protestantism protected and nurtured
by a limited-constitutional monarchy seemed much more attractive than
the ordeals of the seventeenth century.
The eighteenth-century colonies all experienced a complex process
at once political, social, cultural, and economic that Murrin has dubbed
Anglicization.5 What he meant by Anglicization would more accurately
be called “Britishization,” but Murrin coined the term while writing his
1966 Yale Ph.D. dissertation “Anglicizing an American Colony: The
Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts,” well before thinking in
terms of a British history was common.6 Yet his concept of Anglicization
resulted from doing British history long before that approach had a con-
stituency. Anglicization revealed that British history had an essential
North American dimension.
Murrin’s work on the golden age of colonial America (roughly the forty
years after 1720) fits well with the scholarship on Britain that explains the
formation of a British identity and a rising British nationalism.7 Indeed,
by focusing only on the British Isles, historians of eighteenth-century
6
Britain often did not emphasize just how imperial and transatlantic the
nationalist story they were telling was. In the royal New England colo-
nies, a political culture developed in which the royal governors, following
the example of Whig parliamentary leaders such as Robert Walpole, used
the patronage at their disposal to build majorities in their colonial leg-
islatures. Beginning particularly during the 1720s and 1730s, these New
England colonies began to replicate the economic diversity and complex-
ity of Britain and to reproduce the social relations and legal culture this
sort of economy encouraged. More extensive and widespread commercial
relations often extended beyond town boundaries, which led to the rising
significance of county government. The growing importance of county
government produced a vast increase in offices beyond the town level,
such as Justice of the Peace, which were in the royal governors’ gift, and
those offices became a vital source of this patronage. These social and eco-
nomic relations produced in New England a more stratified society where
provincial elites monopolized local and county offices and dominated
colonial legislatures. By the end of the 1730s the royal colonies of New
England were producing an emerging ruling class that could realistically
aspire to the polite commercial gentility of the British gentry and the ris-
ing British middle class.
These interlocking social, political, cultural, and economic develop-
ments were a prime example of the process of Anglicization. These devel-
opments show the crucial imperial and transatlantic dimension of the
formation of eighteenth-century British identity and British national-
ism grounded in polite gentility and consumer culture. One of the more
effective and powerful depictions of this formation, which also provides
a sense of its suddenness and timing, can be found in a passage from Paul
Langford’s A Polite and Commercial People: “The architect John Wood,
writing in 1749, listed the novelties introduced since the accession of
George II. Cheap and dirty floorboards gave way to superior deal covered
with carpets. Primitive plaster was concealed with smart wainscoting.
Stone hearths and chimney-pieces, customarily cleaned with white-
wash which left a chalk debris on the floor, were abandoned for hard-
wood embellished with brass locks. Mirrors had become both numerous
and elegant. Walnut and mahogany, in fashionable designs, superseded
primitive oak furniture. Leather, damask, and embroidery gave seating a
comfort unobtainable with cane or rush.”8 Wood dated these tremendous
7
Introduction 7
changes, the stuff of polite commercial gentility, and the source of intense
national pride and a sense of superiority, as taking place between 1727
and 1749. The English, lowland Scots, and Protestant Irish converged on
this polite, commercial, and British culture, and became Britons during
the decades of the 1730s and 1740s, at the same time as those living in
New England. British identity was a transatlantic development. To a great
extent, those living in New England embraced it because they were not
simply following a long-established set of behaviors, but were participat-
ing in their formation from the start.
This coeval development of British identity in Britain and the New
England colonies—this process of Anglicization—was a crucial part of
the making of a colonial ruling class, as Murrin discusses in the essay co-
written with his former student Gary J. Kornblith, “The Making and
Unmaking of an American Ruling Class.” In the royal New England
colonies, this ruling class increasingly embraced the post–Glorious
Revolution British identity that celebrated limited-constitutional mon-
archy, the accomplishments of the fiscal-military state, and the ideals of
liberty, property, and a broad-bottomed pan-Protestantism. This ruling
class attached no stigma to accepting offices from royal governors. As
Murrin has pointed out, in 1763, on the eve of imperial crisis, fully 71% of
the Massachusetts General Court also held the office of JP, a royal office
in the governor’s gift. Here in New England was J. H. Plumb’s explana-
tion for the growth of English political stability with a vengeance.9
The messy mid-Atlantic colonies reveal a similar story. Royal New York
took longer than Massachusetts and New Hampshire to achieve
Anglicized, court-Whig-inspired political stability. But the relations
between the royal governor and the elite New Yorkers who dominated
local politics and the colonial assembly improved dramatically begin-
ning in the early 1750s with the rise of men such as James Delancey.10
Murrin has shown that a colony riven by ethnic conflict and divisions
within the English community as late as 1710 or so could by the 1740s
produce home-grown, highly respectable, and impeccably credentialed
British gentlemen such as Delancey.11 These elites constituted a colonial
ruling class that had every confidence the solutions to any pressing issues
or problems lay within the British Empire, as evidenced by their ability
to rise to positions of prominence as local magnates and thoroughgoing
empire men.
8
In the decade before the Stamp Act Crisis New York’s place within
the empire had never been more stable and secure, and the political rela-
tions between the royal executive and the colonial legislature were more
harmonious than they had been in forty years. A similar trend occurred
in Pennsylvania. There, colonial American–born British gentlemen
and consummate empire men, such as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph
Galloway, longed for the King to replace Pennsylvania’s proprietary gov-
ernment with royal government. For men such as Franklin, royal govern-
ment connoted modern, professional administration and the security of
British liberty.12
Anglicization meant for Murrin the process by which the eighteenth-
century colonies converged upon a British identity of polite com-
mercial gentility, the new mainstream institutions and values of
limited-constitutional monarchy, a broad Protestant unity, and the
dynamic, fiscal-state-driven economic diversity that fueled economic
growth in Britain and the empire. Thus, Murrin has shown that the
model Bernard Bailyn proposed in The Origins of American Politics did
not explain the political culture of the northern colonies. Bailyn had
argued that royal governors in the colonies had extensive authority on
paper, but very little practical power, such as sources of patronage with
which to build majorities in colonial legislatures. Colonists believed they
had reason to fear over-mighty executives, who were in fact far weaker
than was executive authority in Britain. For Bailyn, this unnecessary fear
of executive power encouraged devotion to country ideology, a belief sys-
tem designed to denounce and discredit executive authority. A language
of opposition that was marginal in Britain by the 1730s became central
to the political culture of the colonies. Thus, colonial politics was brit-
tle and combustible, combining weak executives with a dominant polit-
ical idiom that encouraged extreme suspicion of central authority. This
political structure strongly suggested the inevitability of the American
Revolution.13
Murrin has shown that Bailyn’s model does not explain the royal colo-
nies in New England where governors possessed ample patronage, success-
fully practiced Walpoleon court Whig methods of political management,
and forged harmonious relations with their legislatures prior to the mid-
1760s. Nor did the model explain the mid-Atlantic where New York,
though never as completely, moved in the direction of New England, and
9
Introduction 9
where the most prominent Pennsylvanians in the legislature campaigned

to oust the Proprietor and to replace him with royal government. In those
colonies, country ideology was present in the same way that it was in
eighteenth-century Britain. It was a language of critique expressed by a
minority on the outs, was rarely taken seriously by the majority or the
influential, and was simply not the dominant political idiom.
But did the southern slave societies Virginia and South Carolina expe-
rience Anglicization, and did they, in any way, fit Bailyn’s model? When
compared directly to the eighteenth-century Anglicizing northern col-
onies, Virginia and South Carolina would seem to fit Murrin’s defini-
tion of “American.” In various writings Murrin has described a spectrum
of settlement ranging from the British Isles to the British West Indies.
Britain, almost exclusively white and Anglophone, fully embracing the
post–Glorious Revolution world of polite commercial gentility, liberty,
property, and Protestantism, and economic diversity was the most heavily
Anglicized society in the world. The farther south one traveled along the
spectrum of settlement, the less fully Anglicized the eighteenth-century
British colonies became. New England most closely replicated Britain’s
political, social, cultural, and economic practices. The middle colonies
were close behind New England, but with more ethnic diversity, more
slaves, and less political stability. And the southern colonies were more
“American,” with more slaves and less economic diversity, while the West
Indies were the most “American” colonies, producing societies and econ-
omies that looked the least like those of eighteenth-century Britain.14
Murrin has also pointed out that eighteenth-century Virginia and
South Carolina looked far more “American” when compared to the eight-
eenth-century northern colonies than they did when compared to their
own seventeenth-century pasts. In the eighteenth century these southern
colonies also produced highly stratified societies and ruling elites who
took their social and cultural cues of polite gentility from the English
landed gentry, and who embraced the mainstream British institutions
of limited-constitutional monarchy and the Anglican church. Here, if
anywhere, Bailyn’s model might at first glance seem to explain things.
Virginian and South Carolina (and later but much less significantly
Georgia) were the only Anglophone societies where country ideology
became the dominant political idiom. That was unsurprising, since coun-
try ideology glorified the very sorts of people the great tobacco and rice
10
planters insisted they were.15 One could expect to find intense political
instability and a deep suspicion of and hostility toward royal government
in societies where powerful local ruling classes took country ideology so
seriously.
Yet as Murrin has shown, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia
became the most harmonious political societies in the English-speaking
world.16 They became so once the royal governors (in Virginia as early
as the years just before 1720) learned to take planter elites at their word.
Royal governors began to treat their local ruling classes as the respectable,
genteel, and patriotic patriarchs they believed they were and to forge a
political culture of mutual admiration, respect, and country harmony. The
process of Anglicization in the south also showed that widespread access
to country ideology, even where it became the dominant political idiom,
did not make political conflict or anti-crown sentiment inevitable. Thus,
by the mid-eighteenth century the British North American colonies were
benefiting greatly from their presence in the empire and had produced
confident ruling elites who, in their various ways, took their cues from
British society and culture, ruled their provinces, shared mutual respect
and harmony with their royal governors, and were far more British in
thought and deed than ever before.17
It is essential to have some understanding of this process of eighteenth-
century Anglicization to fully appreciate Murrin’s essays exploring the
American Revolution and the early American republic. Understanding
the complex, overlapping developments that produced Anglicization
allows us to follow Murrin’s discussion of how vital cooperation could
produce spectacular triumph in North America by 1763. That same
understanding is essential to comprehending how this vital cooperation
could end with revolutionary violence thirteen years later, and eventually
produce a society by the 1820s that none could have imagined in 1776 and
that few would have wanted.
The essays in Rethinking America treating the Seven Years War (called
by the British North Americans the French and Indian War) and the impe-
rial crisis, “The French and Indian War, The American Revolution, and
the Counterfactual Hypothesis,” “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution,”
and significant parts of “The Great Inversion, Or Court Versus Country,”
and “Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The
American Revolution Considered as a Social Accident,” show that prior
1
Introduction 11
to the late 1760s the default mainstream colonial position was one that by
1776 would be viewed as loyalist. Murrin explains that the gloomy years
of defeat in the Seven Years War prior to 1759 resulted primarily because
British military officials such as Lord Loudon did not know how to work
with confident, prideful, and increasing self-confident, Anglicized colo-
nial Americans. These colonists did not doubt that they were British sub-
jects fully entitled to all the rights and liberties that came with that status.
Britain’s imperial enterprise had succeeded by 1750 in producing a
sprawling population of aggressive colonial landowners capable of rep-
licating British institutions, society, and culture. On a far greater scale
than the other European early modern Atlantic world empires, British
imperial policymakers had to consider how to incorporate into their
triumphal empire a substantial population of subjects who were locally
producing many of their own institutions and methods of governance.
The Anglicizing thirteen colonies were, in Murrin’s phrase, voluntary-
cooperative societies. Inside the colonies the actual coercive power of
the British state—best represented by the navy—could not intrude as
it could on the oceans. In the colonial interior, to administer imperial
policies—to govern the empire—required figuring out how to convince
the colonists to voluntarily cooperate with the policies.
This need for voluntary cooperation meant that the British Empire
was in reality a federal system, and the critical line dividing power in it
was the North American coastline. Britain had coercive power on the
oceans that it did not possess in the interior. Murrin shows that in the
first phase of the Seven Years War the British betrayed no knowledge of
the critical role the coastline played in the practical reality of running
the empire. Yet the Seven Years War, Murrin explains, in fact provided
two models for the empire—the first showing how it could be lost, the
second revealing how it could triumph and expect to enjoy continued
harmony and success. The imperial crisis of 1764–1775 began due to three
sources of conflict: first, Britain’s demand that the colonists pay some of
the military costs of defending North America; second, Britain’s insist-
ence that the colonists quarter troops; and third, the frustrations, which
grew into hatreds, that colonists felt toward the British soldiers in their
midst. Murrin explains how from 1759 to end of the Seven Years War
William Pitt structured imperial policies that led the colonists to eagerly
and voluntarily tax themselves to pay military costs and quarter troops.
12
The policies also encouraged genuine support and even affection for
British soldiers. Murrin’s argument fits well with the conclusions of Fred
Anderson and John Shy. Victory in 1763 was very much a joint British
and colonial affair, and in 1763 the majority of colonists had never been
prouder of their British identity and had never felt more secure in their
British liberties. The result of six decades of Anglicization was that in 1763
the British Empire reached its apex.18
In “The French and Indian War, The American Revolution, and the
Counterfactual Hypothesis” and “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution”
Murrin explains how, with some exceptions, particularly the brief but
effective ministry from 1765 to 1766 of Charles Watson Wentworth,
the Marquis of Rockingham, British imperial policymakers drew all the
wrong lessons from the war and failed “to think triumphantly.” The three
great imperial crises of 1764–1766, 1767–1770, and 1773–1775 cumula-
tively destroyed the colonial willingness to provide voluntary cooper-
ation. British policy, from the perspective of the colonists, seemed to
contemptuously deny that they were British subjects and part of the
Glorious Revolution legacy that protected liberty and property, prima-
rily by connecting taxation to representation.19
Though the empire was a federal system where the critical axis that
divided power was the coastline, the twelve years after 1764 also showed
that it was a federal system without a justifying federal ideology. As impe-
rial policymakers and their colonial critics were forced into clearer and
clearer, and angrier and angrier, conversation (a conversation that Pitt’s
voluntary-cooperative methods avoided and that Rockingham’s strategies
in 1765–1766 temporarily ended), they found that they disagreed about
the empire’s structure. Yet neither the British nor the colonial position
could explain how the empire worked. His Majesty’s government main-
tained that it was sovereign. It could tax and legislate throughout Britain
and the empire. The colonial critics insisted that, because they were
British, they enjoyed liberty and property and so taxation connected to
representation. The power to tax, if unchecked, could leach away all prop-
erty and so too liberty. Therefore, it was a uniquely dangerous power, a
power that threatened liberty in a way that the power to legislate (govern
behavior but not take a subject’s property) did not. Special constraints
had to be placed on the power to tax that did not have to be placed on the
power to legislate. Thus colonial critics of imperial policy accepted that
13
Introduction 13
Parliament could legislate for the colonies. It could govern their behavior
with the Navigation Acts, the Iron Act, and the Hat Act. But only their
own colonial legislatures could tax them. Only the colonial legislatures
met the two requirements necessary for taxation to be connected to rep-
resentation: that the taxers were elected by the taxpayers, and that the
taxers were required to pay the same taxes they levied on the taxpayers.
Yet in reality, Parliament could for the most part impose its will on
the oceans with both legislation, such as the Navigation Acts, and taxa-
tion, such as the Sugar Act, especially in its amended 1766 form. Indeed,
even the external Townshend duties proved hard to resist. A boycott
movement took two years to develop, and only truly got going after Lord
Hillsborough ordered the colonial governors to dissolve the colonial leg-
islatures should they dare to discuss a letter from the Massachusetts leg-
islature urging them to denounce the Townshend Acts. It seems unlikely
that most legislatures would ever have endorsed the Massachusetts
Circular Letter (hardly any had even begun to discuss it several months
after receiving it) until they were ordered not to do so, which made it a
vital principle regarding the legislatures’ freedom and autonomy.20
While Parliament could tax and legislate on the oceans, it could only
conduct policy in the interior with the colonists’ voluntary cooperation.
Pitt had shown that the colonists would voluntarily do pretty much all
of what the post-1763 coercive measures were demanding that they do.
But the Stamp Act Crisis showed that the colonists would withhold their
voluntary cooperation from a measure that they believed threatened to
destroy their British liberties. And if they did withhold their cooperation,
they could quickly nullify and render moot any internal measure. The
colonists’ sense of an imperial constitution acknowledged Parliament’s
authority to legislate. Yet internal legislation also required voluntary
cooperation in a way that external legislation did not, even though such
legislation did not provoke the clear and consistent ideological rejection
that taxation did. Neither imperial policymakers nor their colonial critics
could imagine a federal ideology that identified the coastline for what it
was: the true axis of a separation of powers. Because they could not, the
acrimonious conversation continued.21
As it did, Murrin argues in “The Great Inversion” and “1776: The
Countercyclical Revolution,” country ideology began to have the impact
Bailyn had mistakenly granted to it for an earlier period. By the late 1760s,
14
for a growing number of people in the colonies country ideology did

seem to explain British policy and why a nation created by the Glorious
Revolution had slowly but inexorably become a corrupted instrument of
tyranny. For the first time country ideology became the dominant polit-
ical idiom in the northern colonies. And in the southern colonies, where
it had long been dominant but had fostered a political culture of harmony
and mutual admiration between elites and crown officials, it now pro-
voked bitter suspicion and hostility. The empire was in crisis.
An irony was that British policymakers from a distance could see the
colonies as a single unit: America. The policymakers proceeded simulta-
neously to impose policies on the colonies that provoked them to resist by
defending their collective British identity and British liberty. By provok-
ing them all at once, imperial policymakers drove the colonies together
and stimulated their common sense of purpose and a distinct unifying
identity that little in their disparate colonial experiences had provided
before. Yet resisting the British, as Murrin discusses in the co-authored
“Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder,” raised danger-
ous issues for the Anglicized colonial elites who had, until very recently,
been highly satisfied with their place within the British Empire.
Between 1725 and 1765 one key aspect of Anglicization was growing
social and economic stratification and the rise of an elite governing class
in every colony, developments explored in “Feudalism, Communalism,
and the Yeoman Freeholder” and “The Making and Unmaking of an
American Ruling Class.” As in Britain, the eighteenth-century colonies
began to produce conflicts due to disparities in wealth and power, what
Murrin called part of a feudal revival. Prior to the great disruption of
1765–1775, colonial British North America was producing in every col-
ony Anglicizing colonial elites, highly loyal empire-minded gentlemen.
They were confident they had far more in common with a transatlantic
community of polite, commercial, imperial British middle class and gen-
try than they did with their fellow colonials lower in the social order. The
imperial crisis was countercyclical in part because it shattered that confi-
dence. Yet as colonial elites began to resist British policies and provoke
conflicts with the empire, they had no choice but to reach out to and
invite in their fellow colonials, who had their own additional and con-
siderable grievances about the structure of colonial society. The British
were frightened by Stamp Act riots, but so were elite colonial leaders, who
15
Introduction 15
grew less and less confident by the final months of 1765 that they were in
fact leading anything.22
As the need to confront Britain grew more acute after 1770, colonial
elites had to balance their fear of power above them with their fear of
challenge to their own power from below. “Feudalism, Communalism,
and the Yeoman Freeholder” and “The Making and Unmaking of an
American Ruling Class” fully endorse Carl Becker’s powerful insight that
a battle for home rule quickly provoked a sustained, internal conflict over
who would rule at home. By 1776 what had begun as a constitutional con-
flict had become an overwhelming crisis. Constitutional disagreements
intensified beyond containment due to the heavy reliance on country ide-
ology to explain Britain’s actions. That ideological dimension galvanized
elite colonists to continue to encourage resistance. The more they did so,
the more they opened up space for those below them in the social order
to force their own grievances and concerns into the midst of the impe-
rial crisis. By 1775–1776 the situation was revolutionary as the Coercive
Acts, for the first time, provoked the vast majority of colonists to reject
Parliament’s authority to legislate as well as tax. Yet by 1775–1776 the
movement to declare independence could not help but become a wide-
spread argument about existing social, cultural, political, and economic
arrangements and relations within the colonies. Country ideology had
now produced a virulent hatred and disgust for British government and
British institutions. Yet the social upheaval of the previous decade also
meant that whatever replaced the world produced by Anglicization, colo-
nial elites would be sharply challenged as they sought to conceive, create,
and control it.
Murrin’s discussion of the decade of imperial crisis reveals much about
the nature of the British Empire and suggests a valuable model for how
to draw together and learn from the disparate historiographies that
have attempted to explain the coming of the American Revolution. By
bringing together all of these issues, themes, and developments, Murrin
draws omnivorously on the three historiographical traditions that in the
twentieth century vied to explain the Revolution’s origins. By taking seri-
ously each of these historiographies, Murrin made himself into what he
has often described as a radical, imperial, Whig. As he discusses in “Self-
Immolation: Schools of Historiography and the Coming of the American
Revolution,” and as is implicit in so many of his essays, Murrin has seen
16
great benefit in the classic work of the imperial school best represented
by Herbert Levi Osgood, Charles McLean Andrews, George Louis Beer,
and later Lawrence Henry Gipson. From them Murrin learned to think
carefully about the British Empire as an empire, to pay close attention
to its structures and policies and to the men who administered it, and
to consider all the challenges and complexities they faced. At the same
time, as he studied with Edmund Morgan, read and admired Bailyn and
Gordon Wood, and worked alongside John Pocock for many years at
Washington University in St. Louis, Murrin was a virtuoso contributor
to the neo-Whig historiography that took principles and ideas so seri-
ously. This historiographical school produced Morgan’s careful constitu-
tional discussion of imperial relations and Bailyn’s, Wood’s, and Pocock’s
recovery of the rich ideological world that explained the significance of
country ideology and, eventually, the republican synthesis.23
Yet it was clear to Murrin as he earned his Ph.D. and began his career
in the late 1960s, as the New Left or neo-Progressive historians began to
publish their vital work, that the internal cleavages and class conflicts they
were recovering had a central place in the American revolutionary story.
The only way to explain how a constitutional conflict in 1764–1765, one
that virtually all colonial participants were confident could be resolved
within the empire, became a violent, bloody revolutionary upheaval by
1776–1778, was to tell a complete and synthetic story that the imperial,
neo-Whig, and neo-Progressive historians could not fully or adequately
explain without the others. To more completely explain the emergence
and impact of the American Revolution, one had to become a radical,
imperial, Whig, which was a sophisticated, complex, and flexible schol-
arly project that required synthesizing institutional, intellectual, constitu-
tional, social, cultural, political, and economic history—in other words,
the project laid out by the concept of Anglicization.
During his career, Murrin’s pleas for synthesis, his urging of his fel-
low scholars to join him in becoming radical, imperial, Whigs, went
unheeded. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Murrin would begin his grad-
uate seminar on the American Revolution and the Early Republic with a
lecture setting out the dire consequences for a field in which three highly
valuable historiographical literatures refused to engage with one another.
By 2005 he was alarmed enough about the impact that refusal had on the
study of the origins of the American Revolution that he agreed to give
17
Introduction 17
this lecture in public at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
Then in 2007 John Murrin wrote his final essay, unpublished until now.
In “Self-Immolation: Schools of Historiography and the Coming of
the American Revolution” he assesses in print the consequences of the
three dominant historiographical traditions that sought to explain the
American Revolution failing to engage with each other. The result was
the self-immolation of each school and, for the previous two decades,
almost no work on the causes of the Revolution. “Self-Immolation” was a
final plea that scholars become radical, imperial, Whigs. When he deliv-
ered the paper at the Columbia Seminar, Murrin noted that this lack of
scholarly interest might be changing. In the decade since Murrin wrote,
it has. Several books and essays have revived interest in the causes of the
Revolution, and recently others have called for synthesis and integration.24
Yet we have been here before. Murrin’s “The Great Inversion” was an
earlier plea that the neo-Whig and neo-Progressive schools talk to one
another. And, as Murrin pointed out in a William and Mary Quarterly
forum assessing Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic,
Wood’s book is mischaracterized as solely a history of ideas and ideol-
ogy.25 Wood drew heavily on the themes of the neo-progressive school
and sought to integrate the material with the ideological. That Creation
of the American Republic is often assigned to the neo-Whig school, with
little awareness of its real debt to the progressive historiographical tradi-
tion, makes evident that earlier pleas for integration and synthesis went
unheeded.
Despite recent developments, there are reasons to be less than hopeful.
Much of the recent scholarship still seems to be re-creating earlier choices
and for now, emphasizing economic causes and downplaying ideologi-
cal and constitutional issues.26 Indeed, at the conference in Philadelphia
that produced The American Revolution Reborn, the editors of the 2012
The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution noted that none of the
thirty-three essays dealt with the ideological world recovered by Bailyn,
Wood, and Pocock and that had played such a vital part in Murrin’s rad-
ical, imperial, Whig synthesis. The editors certainly did not celebrate the
absence; they noted it and thought we should ponder it.27
Murrin developed his insight of Anglicization only by crossing meth-
odological boundaries. These crossings led him to creatively synthesize
the American Revolutionary era’s disparate historiographies. Explaining
18
the imperial crisis and the American Revolution requires the scholar-
ship of the radicals, the imperials, and the Whigs, and the concept of
Anglicization allows that scholarship to be woven together. Murrin
believes that it is impossible to understand the colonial reaction to
the shift in British imperial policy after 1763 without taking seriously the
insights of the constitutional and ideological perspective provided by the
neo-Whig scholars. Yet doing so should convince us to stop seeking to
distinguish between what was constitutional/ideological and what was
material/economic in the colonial reaction. The leading colonial crit-
ics of the Sugar and Stamp Acts, such as James Otis and Daniel Dulany
(Dulany became a loyalist in 1776), were thoroughly Anglicized subjects.
Their critique, insisting on the connection of taxation to representation,
was possible only because their identity and consciousness was funda-
mentally shaped by post-1688 ideas, ideals, and categories. At the heart of
this Glorious Revolution–inspired mentality was the absolute confidence
that Britons enjoyed the natural right to private property and its protec-
tion in ways that were denied to everybody else. The constant refrain “lib-
erty and property” is a reminder that these eighteenth-century subjects
did not distinguish between the constitutional/ideological and the mate-
rial/economic in the ways that we so often still insist they must.
Such distinctions never existed in the early modern era. Public politics,
a public sphere, really began in England with arguments over how far the
Protestant Reformation should go.28 From the 1570s, and certainly by the
reign of James I, the English could associate the ability to continue this
conversation, and push their monarchs in a more purely Protestant direc-
tion, with their monarchs’ need to frequently summon Parliaments. And
it was easy for them to understand that monarchs summoned Parliaments
when they needed to tax. Those who controlled taxation had a tremen-
dous impact on whether critical religious conversations could happen.
It was in reaction to charged Parliaments and those sorts of questions
that the early Stuarts began to more vigorously champion Divine Right
and prefer prelates who preached in support of it.29 Strident defense of
Divine Right led in response to clearer and more frequent articulation of
Parliament’s customary role and the possibilities for limits to monarchi-
cal authority. As the early Stuarts faced chronic fiscal crisis, more frequent
Parliaments led to more charged encounters and greater entrenchment in
the arguments for Divine Right and limited monarchy.
19
Introduction 19
Nowhere in this story is it helpful to distinguish between the consti-

tutional/ideological and the financial/economic/material. Subjects had
to control their property and the state’s access to it to be able to have the
public culture and politics that preserved their liberties and saved their
souls. They needed an economy in which they could further their material
interests, because only subjects secure in their property could ensure the
survival of the institutions that protected and preserved their core ideo-
logical/constitutional and religious values. After the Glorious Revolution
Britons viewed liberty, property, prosperity, and Protestantism as of a
piece—and preserved only by limited-constitutional monarchy. A gov-
ernment that threated any of those things threatened all of them. Subjects
who opposed policies that could threaten their material circumstances
were also opposing policies that could reduce them to a point where
they could no longer protect their liberties and constitutional traditions.
A government imposing policies that degraded liberties and constitu-
tional traditions would escape the limitations that protected subjects’
property and prosperity. Those connections were automatic and axio-
matic for the Anglicized subjects who denounced the Sugar and Stamp
Acts with constitutional arguments, and who over the course of the next
decade tried to comprehend their place in a British Empire that faced a
swiftly escalating imperial crisis.
The breakup of the British Empire produced during that decade was
profoundly disruptive; it violently ruptured all of the significant and
integrative trends that had been shaping the colonies for most of the
eighteenth century. American citizens had to fight a terribly difficult war
and then re-create their polity, economy, and society after having rejected
and destroyed most of the institutions and practices they had grown up
with. Portions of “The Great Inversion,” “Feudalism, Communalism,
and the Yeoman Freeholder,” and “The Making and Unmaking of An
American Ruling Class,” as well as “Fundamental Values, the Founding
Fathers and the Constitution,” “Escaping Perfidious Albion,” “A Roof
Without Walls,” and “War, Revolution, and Nation-Making,” explore
the efforts to cope with what Murrin called “The Great Inversion.”
With that phrase Murrin meant that fundamentally the core of the
revolution settlement in England was the court-Walpolean fiscal-mil-
itary state, while the core of the American revolutionary settlement
put the values of country ideology at the heart of the new Republic’s
20
political culture. In the essays in Rethinking America treating the post–

Revolutionary War years, Murrin discusses how desperately former
colonial elites, the unmade American ruling class, and their advocates
in the Federalist Party of the 1790s struggled to re-create through policy
the world that the golden age of the colonial era had produced: a world
where a recognizable ruling class possessed political, social, cultural, and
economic power.
That world had been shattered by the American Revolution. Despite
the brilliance of Alexander Hamilton’s financial system and the efforts
of the Federalist Party, it could not be put back together again.30 The
Federalist Party of the 1790s took its name from and hoped to build on
the nationalizing efforts of the supporters of the Constitution of 1787.
The Federalists of 1787–1788 conceived a much more powerful nation-
state than the Articles of Confederation had allowed. And Hamilton
made a mighty attempt to squeeze out of that Constitution a genuine
fiscal-military state. Yet post-revolutionary realities guaranteed that for
a very long time the Constitution would remain “a roof without walls.”
With that phrase Murrin meant that the capacity to imagine a national
polity and economy (to envisage a roof ) came long before all the various
practices, institutions, and broader national economic and cultural con-
nections (the walls) existed to support the roof. The walls were not there
in part because the nature of the American revolutionary settlement ren-
dered highly suspect those who sought to build them. But the walls were
also not there because the early American Republic faced many of the
same conditions that had made the British Empire a federal system, one
that required imperial policymakers to secure voluntary cooperation in
order to act in the interior. Under the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, the
early American Republic moved relentlessly across space, but the nation-
state usually found that it could act forcibly in the interior only when
those living there were willing to allow it.31
Murrin, I suspect, would caution those scholars who are at present
arguing for a highly effective and powerful early national nation-state.
He would urge them to do the analogous work for the early American
Republic of being a radical, imperial, Whig to explain the American
Revolution. He would welcome their reappraisals of his statements about
a tiny state in a giant land, but would ask them to write finely grained
histories, paying close attention to when, why, how, and under what
21
Introduction 21
circumstances and conditions the nation-state could be active and power-

ful, and where, when, and why it could be prevented from being so.32
The post-revolutionary nation-state could clearly and forcibly act with
real coercive power when it was doing things that were popular in the
vast interior. Primarily it could seize land from Indians and European
empires and sell it to citizens at ever cheaper prices. The nation-state had
a great deal more difficulty (and not much more success than the British
Empire) at forcing citizens living on that land to do things they truly did
not want to do. The result of the violent disruption of Anglicization, of
the great inversion, was to create a nation of many regions and localities.
These regions were intensely patriotic and even nationalistic because they
were autonomous enough to be able to define the nation in their very
different, even mutually exclusive, images. Murrin discusses this develop-
ment in “War, Revolution, and Nation-Making,” one of the two essays
in Rethinking America not previously published.33 The regional and
local autonomy resulted from a revolution settlement that was far more
country than court, from the sheer immensity of the Republic’s size by
the 1820s, and due to the apotheosis of the yeoman freeholder, which,
“Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder” reminds us, no
politician could safely question in the early American Republic.
This combination of vast size, deep suspicion of a central state, and glo-
rification of the white, male, property-owning head of household made
for a violent, racist, and profoundly gendered American democracy. As
Murrin discusses in “The Great Inversion,” “Feudalism, Communalism,
and the Yeoman Freeholder,” “Escaping Perfidious Albion,” and “The
Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,” the unmaking
of the Anglicizing ruling class, and the defeat of the effort to re-create
something like it in the 1790s, unleashed the millions of white adult
male heads of household to seize as much of the North American con-
tinent as they could. They were supported in their efforts by a nation-
state that only reliably and consistently wielded power over them when
it assisted their efforts. Rapidly after 1820 the nation’s citizens, and those
they could coerce in racial and gender hierarchies, collectively produced a
vast amount of wealth. But this wealth came much more from the bottom
up than it did from the direct involvement of something akin to a fiscal-
military state. This process of wealth creation did not reproduce Patrick
O’Brien’s astute observation about eighteenth-century Britain, where
2
“the economy was driven forward by the state rather than the state being
driven by the economy.”34
The early Republic’s far less nation-state managed and frenzied scram-
ble for wealth produced much more wealth and a far greater concentra-
tion of wealth than had ever been present in the colonial period. This
society and economy produced a great deal of social stratification among
white male heads of household. Fluid social mobility went both upward
and downward; in effect greater emphasis on freedom, autonomy, and
egalitarianism for white men produced among them a great deal of
uncertainty, fluctuation, status anxiety, and the broad democratization
of marginalization and inequality. Boom and bust and wealth and pov-
erty characterized a republic in which citizens were deeply suspicious of a
powerful nation-state, though perhaps it might have been able to alleviate
some of the most savage of the hard times. Instead, the solutions offered
were usually greater glorification of the yeoman freeholder, the violent
seizure of more western land, more intense identification with region,
and a growing demand to push each region’s core institutions and prac-
tices across space. By the 1830s and 1840s these cores had been organized
around free labor in the north and slave labor in the south.
The early American Republic had managed to unleash the energies of
white men by creating a profoundly democratized political culture built
on the autonomy of each citizen from his neighbors, the autonomy of the
locality, state, and region from the nation, and the near-total authority
of the head of household over the social relations within his household
walls. The assumption was that egalitarianism among heads of household
would be maintained as hierarchy was banished from the public realm and
retreated behind those walls. Yet the result was a society in which equality
among white men proved increasingly elusive, which caused ever more
frenzied efforts to secure that autonomy and equality through relent-
less economic growth and geographical expansion. The feverish effort
to maintain equality, and the glorification of the yeoman freeholder that
drove that effort, grew only more desperate as equality moved further out
of reach. The more expansion occurred, the more this bottom-up process
of growth and development produced material resources that were ineq-
uitably distributed. In the early American Republic, the methods used to
lessen inequality among white men were often the most potent sources of
inequality among them.
23
Introduction 23
This democratic culture ever more shrilly insisted that white men must
be equal when they manifestly were not. White male citizens increas-
ingly found some solace in their whiteness and maleness as many of them
could no longer rely on the traditional markers of citizenship: land own-
ership and material independence. A society of intensely regional locali-
ties, which hated dependence and bred suspicion that inequality resulted
from the use of corrupt and concentrated power held by somebody
somewhere, marched relentlessly across the continent. By the mid-1840s
it began to produce an uncontainable crisis. Murrin has said that in the
early American Republic the nation-state could primarily seize land from
Indians and give it away to citizens but that by the 1850s it could no longer
even peacefully manage that. The American Revolution, as he explains it,
was a profoundly countercyclical rupture of almost everything that had
come before it. The Civil War was an even more violent but logical culmi-
nation of a republican experiment whose ideals produced a society where
outcomes moved ever further from the best version of intentions.
The U.S. Civil War exposed with overwhelming and bloody violence the
dilemmas and challenges of the republican experiment and American iden-
tity, the pain of promises and dreams deferred, and the momentous expecta-
tions that American citizens of every variety had of their public institutions
and civic culture. John Murrin’s towering scholarly achievement available in
Rethinking America help us to better comprehend the origins and develop-
ment of the tragedies and possibilities produced by the republican revolu-
tion that made the United States. This obligation of rethinking is ongoing,
indeed perpetual, and never has it been more urgent.
Notes
1. J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England,
1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1999); Richard Cust and Ann Hughes,
eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics
(London: Longman, 1989); Robert Ashton, The Crown and the Money
Market (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960); P. G. Lake, “Calvinism and the
English Church, 1570–1635,” Past and Present 114 (1987): 32–76; Kenneth
Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I,” Journal
of British Studies 24 (1985): 169–207; Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British
Monarchies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
2. John M. Murrin, “Colonial Government,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., Encyclopedia
of American Political History, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1984), 1:293–315;
24
John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole,

eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern
Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 408–56; John
M. Murrin, “Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in America,”
in Eric Foner ed., The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990) 3–23; John M. Murrin, “Magistrates, Sinners, and a
Precarious Liberty: Trial by Jury in Seventeenth-Century New England,”
in David Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate, eds., Saints and
Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York: W. W. Norton,
1984), 152–206; John M. Murrin, “English Rights as Ethnic Aggression: The
English Conquest, the Charter of Liberties of 1683, and Leisler’s Rebellion
in New York,” in William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Authority
and Resistance in Early New York (New York: New-York Historical Society,
1988), 56–94; John Murrin, “The Menacing Shadow of Louis XIV and the
Rage of Jacob Leisler: The Constitutional Ordeal of Seventeenth-Century
New York,” in Stephen L. Schechter and Richard B. Bernstein, eds., New York
and the Union: Contributions to the American Constitutional Experience
(Albany: New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the United
States Constitution, 1990), 29–71; John Murrin, “The New York Charter of
Liberties, 1683 and 1691,” in Stephen L. Schechter, Richard B. Bernstein, and
Donald S. Lutz, eds., Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents
Interpreted (Madison, WI: Madison House Publications, 1990), 47–82; John
Murrin, “Pluralism and Predatory Power: Early New York as a Social Failure,”
Reviews in American History 6 (1978): 473–79
3. W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution
of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Steve Pincus, 1688: The
First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009);
Lionel K. Glassey, ed., The Reigns of Charles II and James VII and II
(London: Macmillan, 1997); Richard Ashcraft, “Revolutionary Politics
and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: Radicalism and Lockean
Political Theory,” Political Theory 8 (1980): 429–86; Tim Harris,
Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms (London: Penguin, 2005); Tim
Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720
(London: Penguin, 2006).
4. For the phrase, see John M. Murrin, Paul E. Johnson, James M. McPherson,
Gary Gerstle, Emily S. Rosenberg, and Norman L. Rosenberg,
Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, 1st ed.
(New York: Thompson Gale, 1996), chapter three.
5. I have provided an extensive discussion of Anglicization as the central
theme of Murrin’s work in Andrew Shankman, “A Synthesis Useful and
Compelling: Anglicization and the Achievement of John M. Murrin,”
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David Silverman eds.,
Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 20–56.
25
Introduction 25
6. J.G.A. Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of

the Unknown Subject,” AHR 87 (1982), 311–336.
7. J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725
(London: Macmillan, 1967); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation,
1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); John Brewer,
The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); A. L. Beir, David Cannadine, and
James M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English
History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from
1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994); Patrick O’Brien, “Inseparable
Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire,
1688–1815,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The
Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53–77;
Patrick O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,”
Economic History Review 41 (1988), 1–32; Paul Langford, A Polite and
Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989); Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman,
1689–1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); H. T. Dickinson,
Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(London: Methuen, 1977); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb,
eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth
Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
8. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 70.
9. John Murrin, “Review Essay,” History and Theory 11 (1972) 226–275, 268.
For a similar process in New Hampshire, see Jere Daniell, “Politics in New
Hampshire under Governor Benning Wentworth, 1741–1767,” William and
Mary Quarterly 23 (1966), 76–105.
10. Stanley N. Katz, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: James DeLancey and
Anglo-American Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Stanley
Katz and John Murrin, eds., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social
Development (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 394–409.
11. John Murrin, “English Rights as Ethnic Aggression” and “The Menacing
Shadow of Louis XIV and the Rage of Jacob Leisler.”
12. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
13. Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1967);
Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
14. John Murrin, “Beneficiaries of Catastrophe” and John Murrin, Liberty,
Equality, Power, 121–133.
15. T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters
on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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house, with whom she had not taken her knitting work, to spend a
social afternoon; and several tea-parties were given in a quiet way at
her own house, where she presided over the silver tea-urn, and old
fashioned china, with more than ordinary condescension and dignity.
But these were all impromptu meetings, and invariably took place
when Mr. Mosier and Phebe were invited elsewhere.
The parents of our young minister were aged and very
respectable farmers, residing in the vicinity of New Haven; but they
were far from wealthy, and the farm they cultivated was not their own
property. A week before the Sabbath appointed for the installation,
Mr. Mosier accompanied his intended bride and her mother on a visit
to his parents, where the haughty matron first learned that the man
whom her daughter was about to marry had been a charity student.
A benevolent society had paid his tuition at Yale College, at least
that portion which he had been unable to meet by his own exertions.
There had been no concealment of this truth on his part, for he had
informed Phebe of the matter, and believed Mrs. Gray already aware
of it. But Phebe, in the generous simplicity of her heart, never
conceived it possible that the manner of his education could be
deemed a cause of reproach, and it had left no impression on her
mind; to her upright understanding there was no degradation in the
thought that her lover had been a charity student.
Mrs. Gray gave no demonstration of the displeasure which filled
her bosom on receiving this intelligence, but she quietly made an
excuse for returning home with her daughter the next day, and, with
every appearance of disinterested kindness, insisted that Mr. Mosier
should not interrupt his visit to accompany them. “She could easily
drive home,” she said, “the horse was gentle, and the roads perfectly
good; her son-in-law must remain with his family; it would be cruel to
force him away so abruptly.” Mrs. Gray said all this in her usual
manner, shook hands with the old people, allowed the young divine
to assist her into the chaise, and pretended to be very intently
occupied in searching for something in her traveling basket, while he
placed Phebe in her seat, and, with her slender hand clasped in his
own, was whispering his farewell.
“Remember, and be in readiness next Sabbath,” he said, in a low
voice, “tell Malina that she must take good care of you. I shall come
on Saturday evening.”
Phebe murmured that she would be ready; but as she returned
the farewell clasp of his hand, tears started to her eyes. She could
not have told the reason, but a strange feeling of melancholy came
over her, and it seemed as if the parting were forever. She looked
back as the chaise drove away—he was standing on the door step
by his parents, and the whole group waved their hands, smiling
cheerfully, as they saw her turn for a last glance. But still her heart
was heavy.
What passed between Mrs. Gray and her daughter during their
drive home, we have no means of recording. But as Malina sat in her
chamber window, and saw the chaise toiling up the hill that
afternoon, her sister leaned forward, and she caught a glimpse of
her face. It was white as marble, and stained with tears. Malina had
been ill, but she started up, hastily girded her white morning wrapper
to her waist, and went down. Mrs. Gray loitered to give some
directions to the “hired man” about her horse, and Phebe was
descending from the chaise without assistance. The moment her foot
touched the earth, she tottered, and would have fallen but for Malina,
who sprang forward, and flinging her arms around her, inquired
eagerly and kindly what had befallen her.
Phebe attempted to speak, but the words died on her lips, and
the color left them; she lifted her hand as if to grasp at something for
support, and fainted in her sister’s arms.
“Mother, what is the matter?—where is Mr. Mosier?—tell me,
pray tell me, what has made poor Phebe so ill, and why is she
looking so wretched?”
Mrs. Gray turned, and saw that her child was senseless.
“Go and bring some water,” she said to the man, “carry that
basket in with you, and make haste. Raise her head a little, you are
crushing her bonnet,” she continued, turning to Malina; “there, take it
off—she will come to, directly.”
As she spoke, Mrs. Gray calmly untied her daughter’s bonnet,
and held it till the man came with water, while Malina stood trembling
beneath the weight of the fainting girl, tenderly smoothing back the
bright tresses from her forehead, and wildly kissing her pale lips,
amid a thousand vague questions, which no one thought of
answering.
Mrs. Gray took a pitcher of water from the man, who came
panting from the well, and laving her hands in it, laid them on the
pale face which Malina was still covering with tears and kisses.
There was a faint struggle, a gasping sigh, and after a little Phebe
began to murmur upon her sister’s bosom, like one just awaking
from a dream. She shrunk from her mother, when that stubborn
woman would have assisted her to rise, and clinging to Malina,
walked with trembling steps toward the house.
“Oh, not there—up, to our own room, Malina,” said the poor girl,
as her sister would have led her into the parlor. She was obliged to
sit down more than once in ascending the stairs; and when at length
Malina laid her upon the bed in their own dear room, she looked
sadly around, and reaching up her arms, clasped the bending neck
of her sister, and began to weep.
“I must never see him again—never—never,” she said, while her
voice was broken with tears; “oh, Malina, did you think any human
being could be so cruel?”
Malina started, and for one instant a flash of pleasure broke into
her eyes. It was an unworthy feeling, and the next moment her face
was flooded with shame that she had known it; and when she sat
down by her sister, and besought her to say what had thus unnerved
her, it was with as true sympathy as ever warmed the heart of a
noble and self-sacrificing woman.
The cause of her sorrow was soon explained. Phebe had been
commanded by her arbitrary mother to give up all thoughts of a
union with Mr. Mosier. The gentle girl, for the first time in her life, had
ventured to expostulate with her parent. The hope of her young life
was at stake, and her heart trembled at the thought of separation
from the man whom she had learned to love so devotedly. It was all
in vain. Mrs. Gray was resolved, her prejudices were aroused, and to
their gratification the happiness of her child was as dust.
Phebe had been educated with almost holy reverence for the
authority of a parent, and though her heart broke, she dared not
oppose her mother’s command. Her spirit withered beneath it, like a
flower trodden to the earth, but she submitted. Not so Malina. Once
more she ventured to reason with and oppose her mother, but only
to call down resentment on her own head. This was no sudden
resolution in Mrs. Gray; she had gone steadily to work, and planned
out her own results. She was one of those cold pattern women who
never know an impulse—whose virtues are polished, like marble,
and as cold. She had paved her way quietly and well. The next
morning, while her two children were sorrowing in their room, she
was driving from house to house, exerting her influence over better
hearts and weaker minds than her own, to the ruin of those who had
loved and trusted her. And while Phebe lay upon a sick bed, a vestry
council was called at the old meeting-house, and a decision passed
by a majority of a single man, which deprived our young minister of
the pulpit he was to have taken as his own the following Sabbath.
Many good and just men of the congregation protested against this
cruel and unjust act; but in churches, as in communities, the good
and the merciful do not always constitute a majority.
The decision of this church meeting was forwarded to Mr. Mosier,
and with it a letter from Mrs. Gray. The next morning he rode by our
cottage on horseback, slowly, and as one in deep and morbid
thought. He crossed the old bridge, and, as he did so, looked
earnestly toward Mrs. Gray’s dwelling. He paused a moment at the
end, and then rode at a brisker pace up the hill.
Phebe had been feverish, and very low, all that morning. Malina
was watching by her side, and as she lay with her eyes closed in an
imperfect slumber, the sound of a horse coming up the road made
her start from the pillow, and while her cheek burned with a more
feverish red, she fixed her eyes upon the open sash.
“It is he—I know it!” she said, clasping her hand, and looking into
Malina’s face; “I will get up; mother cannot refuse to let me see him
this once;” and with a kind of feverish joy the poor girl flung aside the
bed clothes, and stepped out on the floor. With trembling and eager
hands she gathered up her beautiful tresses, and began to braid
them about her head, earnestly beseeching Malina all the time to
assist her in getting ready to go down.
The kind hearted sister required no entreaty. She helped to array
the invalid, though her own breath came gaspingly, and her hands
shook like aspens in performing their duty.
“There, now—there, I am ready. See, do I look very ill, Malina?”
said the excited young creature, turning to her sister; “it will make his
heart ache to see how red my cheeks are. Do you think he will detect
the fever?” and dashing some lavender over her handkerchief with
an impetuosity all unlike her usual quiet movements, the half
delirious girl took her sister’s arm, and was hurrying from the room.
But the sound of a horse, rapidly passing the house, again came to
her ear, and, with a faint exclamation, she sprung to the window just
in time to catch a glimpse of her lover as he rode by. He lifted his
face to the open sash, and she saw that it was very pale. He saw
her, checked his horse an instant, half raised his hand, and then
turning away with seeming effort, he rode slowly down the hill.
“He is gone,” exclaimed the unhappy girl, “gone without a word,
almost without a look!”
And with a wavering step, Phebe Gray moved toward the bed,
and amid the confusion of her feverish thoughts, she called on
Malina to come and undo the bridal wreath which was girding her
forehead so painfully.
But Malina was away. She had caught one glimpse at the pale
face uplifted to her window, and with a wild impulse to see the
minister once more, she flung a shawl over her head, and left the
room. With the speed of an antelope, she darted through the garden,
and forcing a passage through the brushwood which lined a hollow
beyond, leaped down upon the natural basin of granite, where the
rock-spring poured its waves, just as he had dismounted, and was
proceeding to dip up the water in his palm, and bathe his forehead
with it. He looked care-worn and pale, and the expression of his
eyes, as he dropped the water from his hand, and turned them
suddenly on the young girl, was that of a strong heart in ruins, and
with its energies prostrated. He held forth his hand and tried to smile,
but the attempt was a painful one, and died in a faint quiver of the
lips.
Malina did not take his hand—she had no power—but stood with
her left foot half buried in the damp moss which lined the spring, and
the other planted hard against the granite basin; her hands clasped
amid the drapery of her shawl, and her eyes lifted to his, glittering
with excitement, and yet full of tears. The breath came pantingly
through her unquiet lips, and in the struggle of her emotions, the
words of greeting which she would have uttered, were broken into
sobs.
“This is very kind of you, Miss Gray,” said the young clergyman,
in a low voice, which had something of proud constraint in its tones;
“I inquired for you at the house, but your mother informed me that
you were engaged, and that your sister did not wish to see me.”
“Not wish to see you!” exclaimed Malina, suddenly finding voice;
“Phebe—my poor Phebe—not wish to see you! Alas, for her, she
cannot see any one; this cruel business has broken her heart. Oh,
Mr. Mosier, why is it that such wrong can be done? why submit to it?
what right has my mother thus to interfere, to the unhappiness of her
child?”
Mr. Mosier did not reply, his thoughts were far away, and, though
he gazed earnestly on the enthusiastic face lifted to his, Malina knew
that he was not thinking of her. She felt humbled, and turned away
her face as one who had been rebuked. So she stood gazing, with a
look of patient humility, on the waters sparkling in the basin at her
feet, till at last he aroused himself and spoke. But she, who felt every
word he uttered as if it were a tone of music, had no share in his
speech or his thoughts. Things all too precious for her were rendered
to another, and she must endure the pain.
“So she was ill, and could not come. Yet she knew I was there,
and sat in the room all the time. I saw her at the window, and she
looked—tell me, Malina, my sweet, kind sister,” he added, suddenly,
“did she wish to see me?—would she come for a moment here or
into the garden?”
The young man looked anxious, and his cheek flushed brilliantly
as he spoke, for the moment his well regulated mind had lost its
balance, and the passions of earth were strong within him. It was but
for a moment; before Malina had time to reply, the flush died from his
face.
“No,” he added, with a sorrowful motion of the head, “it is wrong
to ask, foolish to desire an interview—comfort her, Malina, say that
which I cannot have permission to utter in her presence; say how
deeply, how earnestly I have loved her, how weary I am of the world,
how lonely my heart is now—say to her—alas! what message have I
to send—I, who can scarcely turn my face heavenward, the clouds
are so dark that lie heaped before me!”
These words were uttered in a tone of such despondency that
Malina once more lifted her eyes, and would have spoken words of
encouragement which she was far from feeling, for her own
wretchedness seemed completed in that of the beings she most
loved; but, while her lips were parted, he made a sudden effort at
composure, and saying that all might yet be well, in a broken and
hurried voice, he drew Malina toward him and stooped to press his
lips to her forehead, without seeming conscious of the act—but she
was all too conscious, the blood rushed to her cheeks, and she
trembled in his arms like a frightened child. He saw it not, for to his
thought she was a sister only, and though his lips had pressed her
forehead for the first time, he did not think of it, but mounted his
horse and rode away before she had power to utter a word or make
a gesture to detain him.
He was gone forever, and she was alone—alone! how often is
that word misapplied; the loving and the loved are never alone—but
so it was with Malina Gray.
——
CHAPTER IV.
“In the cold, damp earth we laid her,
When the forest cast its leaf,
And we sighed, that one so beautiful
Should have a lot so brief.”
“So, Madam, you refuse—my boy is dying, and he yearns to look

once more on the poor girl who would have been his wife in a single
week.”
It was but a few days after her interview with Mr. Mosier, that
Malina heard these words issue from her mother’s parlor, as she was
passing through the hall, from the chamber where she had just left
Phebe striving to beguile her weary thoughts with a book. The door
was ajar, and there was a power in the words which made her start
and listen. It was a deep, manly voice, that of an aged person, but
entreaty, tenderness and something almost like resentment,
combined to render it startling and pathetic. Malina held her breath,
and, drawing a step nearer, looked through the door.
An aged man was standing before her mother, he held a cane
without resting on it, and a broad brimmed hat was in his left hand;
firm and erect he stood in the quiet room, the gray hair sweeping
back from his forehead, and his plain dress giving him the look of a
patriarch; his face was agitated, but so full of benevolence that
Malina loved the old man before she guessed who he was. Violent
passions could seldom have passed over those mild features, still
they were disturbed as he spoke, and the good old man was
evidently struggling with strong and bitter emotions. There was
something in the grasp of his hand on the cane, and in his dignified
bearing, which awed the sympathy it excited.
Mrs. Gray was sitting in her easy chair, looking rather earnestly at
the old man. She had been engaged in knitting when he entered, but
had laid the work on a little round stand by her side, and seemed
rather anxious to take it up again; but she was too punctilious for
that, and very blandly requested her visitor to resume the seat from
which he had risen. “No, I have not time to sit down, every minute is
worth years to me now—my only son is dying, and I am absent from
his side.” The old man now paused, his chin began to quiver, and
turning away his face, he strove to conceal the tears that broke into
his eyes from the calm and heartless woman who sat gazing upon
him.
“Madam,” he said, but his voice was broken, and his hand shook
till the hat fell from his grasp to the floor. “Madam, I beseech you,
think better of this! My boy cannot live forty-eight hours; the doctors
told me so before I left him. But I came from his bed side, when each
lost moment was as a drop of blood wrung from my heart, thinking
that you might refuse any messenger but his father. You are a
woman and should feel for him, and here I gave up five whole hours
of this precious time that he might look on the face of that poor girl
before he dies; and his mother—you have had children sleeping
against your heart, madam—do you think his mother would not find it
a comfort if the soul of her only child could go up to heaven from her
bosom where he nestled in his first infancy? Do you think she has no
woman’s yearning wish for the last embrace, the last endearing
word? She loves the boy better than her own soul, and he is dying
before her eyes—but she gave him up. When she saw that he
moaned for the presence of one who had become dearer than his
own mother, she bade me come hither and bring the girl that her first
born might die in the arms he loved best—think, woman, every
moment I spend in talking here is wrung from the death bed of a
child that was all on earth that two old people had to love and hope
for. I must depart, but let her go with me.”
The old man unconsciously clasped his hands as he spoke, and
tears fell like rain over his withered cheeks.
Mrs. Gray glanced at him with something of wonder in her face,
and extending out her hand, took up the knitting work as if to end the
conference.
“And can you still refuse!” exclaimed the old man.
“It would not be proper,” replied Mrs. Gray, quietly unscrewing the
top of her silver knitting case, “besides, Phebe is not well enough to
ride so far even if she desired it, and the fever may be contagious.”
“If I could talk with the young lady I am sure she would desire it,”
said the old man, almost humbly, for his heart grew heavy at the
thought of returning to the death bed of his son with his errand
unaccomplished. “Leave it to her good feelings, madam, and if they
plead against me I will depart and trouble you no more.”
Neither the pleading voice, nor the agony of over-wrought
feelings with which the unhappy father spoke, reached the heart of
Mrs. Gray. While the old man stood before her, trembling beneath
the burden of his grief, she placed her needle in its sheath, twisted
the worsted over her finger, and went through the intricacies of a
seam stitch before even her eyes were lifted toward him.
“You must recollect, Mr. Mosier,” she said, “Phebe is not at
present engaged to your son, and even if she were, I do not think it
would be exactly correct for her to visit him. I am sorry for the young
gentleman, very; I will see that our new minister mentions his case in
prayer next Sabbath; we all feel for him—but he would not be
advised. Indeed⁠—”
Here Mrs. Gray dropped a stitch, and paused while it was looped
up again. When she raised her eyes, the face of her auditor was
stern, and as calm as her own. The tears had dropped from his
cheek, his hands were both grasping the head of his cane, and if that
pharisaical woman could have shrunk from any thing, the solemn
and reproving eyes which dwelt on her face would have kindled the
most generous blood of her heart into blushes of shame. But it is
hard to wring the die of shame from a self-righteous heart. Mrs. Gray
believed herself to be acting in a most Christian-like spirit, in still
retaining the heartless civility of her manner toward the poor old man
whom her own cruelty had bereaved. Her heart was entombed in the
self-conceit of its own sanctity, like dust in the marble of a
sarcophagus.
“Woman,” said the old man, and this time his voice was firm, and
thrillingly solemn; “you have no heart. You are a mother, and should
know how much worse than death it is to see the child whom you
have loved and cherished, and woven in your very heart-strings,
perishing before your eyes. Oh, how proud we were of that boy! how
his poor mother loved him! what a day it was when she and I walked
up the broad aisle of that old meeting-house yonder, and saw him
standing in the pulpit—a minister of the gospel. We had prayed for
that sight—toiled and slaved for it—and were so happy—so very
happy. He is on his death bed now. Woman, you have sent him there
—you, who were a mother, thought nothing of smiting a sister
woman through the heart—you, a professor of religion, can do
murder more subtle and cruel than that which cleaves a man through
the brain, and look calm and speak softly, nay, smilingly refuse the
last dying request of your victim. Woman, I will not curse you—that
right rests with the high God of Heaven, who looketh down upon the
murder you have done, not as man looketh, not as the law looketh—
before him, shall you be arraigned, and that cold heart shall be made
to shudder at the depth of its own crime—he will be thine accuser—
he, thy victim, who was so gentle, so sweet tempered, that thoughts
of revenge never entered his heart. In a few short hours he will stand
in the broad light of Heaven, sent there untimely; and even as Abel
bear witness against his brother, he shall bear witness against thee!
The Almighty may not place his mark upon thy brow—the law may
not brand thee—but one who can wring the life from a human being
by silent and moral cruelty, is not less a murderer than the man who
smites his brother to the heart with a poniard!”
Mrs. Gray was at length moved—for the solemn and stern energy
of that pale old man might have startled the dead from their graves—
the knitting dropped from her hands, her eyes darkled with terror,
and her face turned white as a corpse beneath the snowy lace and
the black and false hair that shaded it. She would have spoken, but
the pallid lips trembled without uttering a sound, while the hands
which rested in her lap began to shiver, as she strove to lift them and
motion him away.
The old man left her where she sat, and went into the hall; but his
feelings had been too cruelly outraged, and there his strength gave
way; he sunk helplessly to a settee, and covering his face with his
hands, wept like a child.
Malina had left the hall and stood in her sister’s chamber. Phebe
was dressed and seated by the window, pondering over the pages of
a book, though she had not turned a leaf that day. She did not raise
her eyes when the door opened, but seemed unconscious of a
second person.
“Come with me,” said Malina, grasping the hand which lay in her
sister’s lap, with fingers that clung to it like ice. “Come!”
There was something in Malina’s face that frightened her
companion from the apathy that had for days settled on her spirits.
She arose, without a word, and was led down stairs, and into the
hall. It was empty. Old Mr. Mosier had departed, and the front door
was left open behind him.
“Phebe,” said Malina Gray, in a faint whisper, “he is dying, and
has sent for you—his father sat there, but a moment since. Our
mother has refused that you should see him. He is pining to die with
his head against your heart. Sister, will you go?”
“I will plead with her—kneel to her,” said Phebe Gray, and
opening the parlor door, she entered alone.
Malina paused an instant, and turning through a side door,
passed across a small clover lot, toward the stables. A horse stood
cropping the white blossoms in a corner of the field. She looked
around for some one to help her, but the men were all away on the
upper farm—so she drew toward the gentle animal, and beckoning
with her hand, uttered a few coaxing words, and persuaded him
toward the stables. He bent his neck while her trembling hands
placed the bit in his mouth, which was yet half full of fragrant grass,
and turned his head to watch her, as she girded the saddle to his
back. When she tied him to the garden fence, and entered the house
again, he followed her with his eyes, and, with a short neigh, fell to
tearing with his mouth the honeysuckle vines that crept along the
fence.
As Malina entered the hall she saw Phebe gliding up stairs
toward their room; she was walking feebly, and held by the bannister
as she went. When the sisters stood within the chamber together,
Phebe sunk to a chair, while Malina looked earnestly in her face, and
uttered a single sentence⁠—
“Will you go?”
“She has forbidden it,” replied Phebe, faintly.
“Will you go?” said Malina, once more.
“I dare not disobey her!” Phebe spoke with difficulty, and clasping
both hands over her face, moaned as if in pain, for the struggle
within her heart was terrible.
When Phebe became sufficiently composed to look up, her sister
was gone. She was glad to be alone, and creeping toward the bed,
knelt down and prayed.
Malina had snatched a bonnet and shawl from the bed while her
sister’s face was concealed, and gliding down stairs into the open
air, she mounted the horse and rode away.
It was sunset as the poor girl came slowly over the old bridge,
and rode by our house. I was playing in the front yard, and ran out to
meet her—but all at once she drew the bridle tight, and the spirited
horse sprung forward on the way before my childish voice could be
heard. The gloom of coming night lay heavily amid the pine boughs,
as the young girl rode under them, and when she dashed up the
road, and disappeared over Fall’s Hill, both horse and rider were for
one moment displayed in bold relief against a pile of crimson and
golden clouds which lay heaped in the horizon. When she
disappeared, it seemed, to my infant fancy, as if the gates of heaven
had unfolded to receive her.
The night came on clear, and lighted both by moon and stars, the
solitary traveler still kept the road, accompanied only by her spirited
animal, and the shadow which seemed gliding along the dewy
green-sward by her side, like a silent guardian. It was late in the
evening when the horse checked himself at the fence before a red
farm-house, with a sloping roof, and two large trees embowering it
with foliage.
It seemed like supernatural instinct in the animal, for he had only
been there once before, and Malina, in the tumult of her thoughts,
scarcely knew where she wished to stop. There was a light twinkling
through the thick leaves of a tree bough that dropped over one of the
front windows, but it was very faint, and seemed forcing itself
through the folds of a window curtain. Malina grasped the horn of her
saddle, and dropping feebly down to the green-sward, moved toward
the house. There was a foot-path which led to the front door—she
followed this, and found herself in a dark entry, with a narrow stream
of light falling through the entrance to an inner room. The sound of a
faint, wandering voice, and of smothered sobs, stole from the room.
Malina breathed heavily as she touched the door, and glided into the
room. It was indeed the chamber of death. A solitary candle burned
on the table, amid glasses and vials, sending forth just sufficient light
to reveal an old fashioned tent bed, with its white drapery sweeping
to the floor, and its heavy fringes hanging motionless, as if they had
been cut from marble. At the foot of this bed knelt an old man; his
hands were clasped beneath his face, and the long gray hair swept
thickly over them, as he prayed. A female stood between Malina and
the bed; she was bending over the pillows which were heaped high
upon it, and though the poor girl could not see her face, she felt that
it was his mother. She moved, and the sound of her footstep on the
sanded floor made the old lady lift her head, and Malina saw his face
once more. Oh, how white and changed it was! The damp, black hair
fell heavily over his forehead, shadows lay about the closed eyelids,
and there was an expression about the mouth, which was not a
smile, and yet seemed deathly and sweet. His head was raised high
with pillows, and though he seemed to sleep, the breath came
painfully from his lips, and with a struggle that constantly disturbed
the linen which lay in waves across his breast.
Malina stood upright in the dim light, motionless as a thing of
marble, her eyes fixed on the dying man, and unconscious, in the
force of her grief, that to all in the room, save him who saw her not,
she was a stranger, and had intruded into the sanctuary of private
grief.
It mattered not; Malina’s step had been mistaken for that of a
woman from the kitchen, and no one knew that the wretched young
creature was there.
There was a motion of the bed clothes, a faint murmur, and the
dying man opened his eyes—those large, eloquent eyes that Malina
had thought upon so often, and so thrillingly. There was a mist upon
them now, but through it broke a soft and strange light, heavenly and
beautiful. The old lady bent her ear, and listened to the faint murmur,
which seemed dying on his lips.
“My father—when will he come back?—it is late!”
The sound was very faint, but the old man had heard it amid the
strong agony of his prayer. He arose, and moving round the bed,
bent over his son. A light, almost preternatural, came to the eyes of
that dying man, and with a sudden effort he found voice to speak.
“My father,” he said, “thank God—you have returned in time.
Where is she?”
“My son,” said the old man, in a voice which he vainly strove to
render calm, “in a little time she will meet you in heaven—but she is
not here.”
The invalid had turned his head upon the pillow, with a look of
touching eagerness; but it fell back—his eyes closed faintly, and
after gasping once or twice, he lay motionless, save the lips, which
gave forth broken but beautiful fragments of speech, such as came
uppermost in his pure, but wandering mind, for he was delirious now.
The last vibrations of his soul were disturbed by disappointment in
his sole earthly wish. In the broken murmurs that fell from his lips,
Malina heard her own name, and it unlocked the ice which seemed
closing round her heart. With a sob that broke to her lips amid a
gush of tears, she sprung toward the bed, and falling upon her
knees, clasped the pale hand which fell over the bed, and pressed
her quivering lips repeatedly upon it, while her voice mingled with the
choking grief that shook her whole frame.
“Forgive me! oh, let me stay!” she said, lifting her face to the old
woman, but still nervously grasping the dying man’s hand; “I loved
him better than she did—better than anybody could—better than my
own soul! Let me stay, and die with him! No one asked me to come,
but I am here. You will not send me away?”
The voice of Malina Gray was soft and low, like that of her sister;
and though broken with grief, it is probable that the dying man was
bewildered by the sound. He started from the pillow—a glorious
lustre broke through the mist which whelmed his eyes, and as Malina
sprang to her feet, his face fell upon her shoulder, and his cold cheek
lay against hers. It was very strange—Malina knew that he was
dying, but a flash of wild joy thrilled through her heart, and for the
first time since she had heard of his illness, a faint color broke into
the cheek which pressed his. She laid him gently upon the pillow,
and parting the damp hair from his forehead, pressed her lips
tremblingly upon it, while her sobs filled the chamber. When the
dying man felt the touch of her quivering mouth, a smile stole over
his face—again the misty eyes were unclosed, and feebly lifting his
arm, he wound it over her neck and drew her to his bosom, while the
unformed words he would have spoken were lost amid the dying
music of his soul. A moment, and his arm fell softly from Malina’s
neck. The young creature lifted her face from his bosom, and looking
at his mother, murmured⁠—
“He loved her living—but is he not mine in death?—mine, for ever
and ever!”
She turned to lay her face near his heart once more, but there
was no color in her lips then. She started, and, with a cold shudder,
bent her cheek slowly to his bosom—it pressed heavily, and more
heavily, on the cold clay—her limbs relaxed, and she sunk across
the bed, senseless as the beautiful corpse which cumbered it.
The gloom of death had shadowed that farm-house two days,
and now it was desolate. The kind neighbors who had walked in and
out, ministering to grief, no longer broke the solemn hush which
pervaded the dwelling. The departed was indeed the departed—for
they had borne him over his father’s threshold, and laid him down to
sleep in the dark earth. Malina followed him to the grave. She was a
stranger, but no one asked why she stood among the mourners, and
without their sable vestments. When the aged mother bent over the
coffin, and looked upon the dead, the young girl drew to her side,
and fixed her eyes upon the cold still face which had never met her
glance coldly before. The mother wept, but Malina could not shed a
tear, although the solemn and hushed grief upon her face awed even
village curiosity.
And now they were alone—the parents, and that poor girl. She
was upon her knees—her head was bent, and its redundant hair
veiled her face, while the broken hearted young creature begged a
blessing from his mother before she went away. The sorrowing
woman laid her hands upon the bright tresses which flowed over her
lap for a moment, then lifting the suppliant to her bosom, wept over
her.
Mr. Mosier, when he heard the sobs of his wife, arose, and
clasping his hands over Malina’s head, silently besought a blessing
on her. She drew back, and he saw that her face was still calm; so
taking her hands in his, he began to persuade and reason with her.
She listened, and gazed earnestly in his face as he spoke. At last,
tears started to her eyes, and when the old man saw this, big drops
began to stream down his own cheek, and the clasp of his hand
grew tremulous, as he led her from the room.
As the old man placed Malina in her saddle, he glanced in her
face, and a misgiving came to his heart. He questioned himself if it
was safe to trust her to the road without protection; but when he
proposed accompanying her part of the way, at least, she pleaded
against it with startling eagerness, and, thinking of his afflicted wife,
he allowed her to depart.
Malina had a secret wish at her heart, which caused it to pant for
solitude. Her road lay close by the grave-yard where our young
minister was buried, and she yearned to stand once more by his
death place, and alone. When she reached the sacred place, she
looked to the right and left, timidly, as if her errand had been a wrong
one. Her nerves were strung to their utmost tension, and she was
morbidly fearful of being seen—every thing was solitary and quiet;
the long grass bending to the breeze, as it sighed over the graves,
and the soft rustling sound which whispered amid the leaves of a
clump of weeping willows, that curtained an entire household that
had gone down to sleep together, were all the sounds that fell upon
her ear. She tied the horse to the fence, and passing forward to his
grave, sat upon a pile of sods that had been left by the sexton. She
neither wept nor moved—but there she remained in the bright
sunshine, gazing hour after hour on a tuft of tiny white blossoms,
which sprung up from a sod which they had placed just over his
heart. Now and then, she twined her hands together as they reposed
in her lap—and as the sunshine went suddenly away, and heavy
black clouds rolled over the sky, with the lightning playing amid their
ragged folds, she smiled, and drew closer to the grave.
At last, a roar of thunder burst from the clouds, big drops of rain
came down upon the graves, and bent the willows more droopingly
to the earth.
Malina lifted her eyes upward with a wild and startled look, then
turning them on the willows which sheltered that single family, and
on the congregation of graves which lay around her, all covered with
long grass, she rested them on the mound at her feet, murmuring⁠—
“Have all a covering from the cold rain, but thee?”
As she spoke, Malina took off her shawl, and spreading it over
the newly made grave, cast herself upon it, and for the first time
since she felt his heart stop beating beneath hers, moaned and
sobbed as if her very life were going from her.
In a few moments the garments of our poor mourner were
saturated with rain—still she clung closer to the grave, murmuring
words of wild endearment to the unconscious inmate, and
congratulating herself, with strange earnestness, that she was still
able to shield his bosom from the storm.
At last, the clouds rolled away, and though the sun was just going
down, his last fires kindled a rainbow amid the water drops that yet
filled the air. Malina lifted her head, and gazed upward—a smile
parted her lips when she saw the rainbow, and pressing her cheek
upon the grave again, she whispered⁠—
“The angels have built thee a bridge, love!”
The sun went down, and Malina arose from the grave, shivering
from head to foot. She gazed around, and was turning her eyes with
a wistful look on her late resting place, as if she meditated casting
herself down again, when a low neigh from the horse which still
remained by the fence, aroused her, and leaving the shawl behind,
she hurried toward the patient animal, and mounting him, rode away.
Malina must have wandered from the usual road, in the strange
abstraction of her mind, for it was midnight when she came opposite
the old meeting-house. Prompted, doubtless, by some vague fear of
returning home, or perhaps allured to pause by the open gate, the
weary and half bewildered girl turned her horse, and riding close to
the front door of the parsonage house, dismounted, and allowed him
to wander amid the flower beds and rose bushes which filled the
yard. Thrusting her hand beneath the door sill, she took out a key,
and fitted it to the lock, but with difficulty, for her hands trembled; and
though hot flushes every moment darted through her frame, she was
shivering with cold. She went up stairs, holding feebly by the
balusters, and guided by the moonlight, which fell from a window
overhead, she entered a room—that which she had decorated as the
bridal chamber of her sister Phebe, and of the departed. A clear
moonlight came through the windows, and lay like flags of silver
amid the black shadows which filled the apartment. Every thing was
still and motionless; not a breath stirred the bridal ribands with which
the muslin curtains were looped back. The bed lay with the
moonlight sleeping amid its pillows, like a snow drift, when the air is
calm; and the atmosphere was impregnated by the dead flowers
which had been profusely lavished on the toilet, and now hung crisp
and withered in their vases. Malina was very ill, and a fever burned
through her veins—her limbs were almost powerless, and her
forehead seemed girdled with iron. Still was she sensible of
surrounding things, and her heart swelled with the recollections
which thronged on her aching brain. She unfastened her damp
dress, and with difficulty crept into bed.
“Poor, poor Phebe,” she murmured, gathering the white
counterpane over her shivering form, “how little she thinks I am here
—how she would pity me, so ill, and all alone. Alas, how sad a thing
this trouble is—I have not thought of Phebe these many long days—I
wonder if she is ill as I am—if her head is so hot, and her limbs
chilled, till they shake so. This is a cold bed—very, very cold—but his
is colder still. Oh, my God! he is dead—and I have seen his grave. I
—but it was not me—no—he loved my sister. But I had his dying
kiss! It was the last throb of his heart that beat against mine, and
chilled me so. That was it—that was it!”
With such fragments of speech, and moans of pain, Malina
verged into the delirium of a raging fever. At times she would weep,
and call for her sister, in tones of yearning tenderness—then notes of
music would break from her lips, and ring through every corner of the
solitary house, as if a prisoned angel were pleading for release
there. When the fever came on, fierce and strong, she began to ask
for water—to weep, and wring her hands, while she entreated some
visionary being to leave her in the grave-yard where he was; where
showers were continually falling and weaving rainbows around those
who thirsted for rest or drink; and so her voice of suffering rose and
swelled through the lone building all night. When the day dawned,
she was still awake and delirious; tears stood on her crimson
cheeks, and entreaties for water still rose to her parched lips.
It came at last—she knew not how it was, but a pale, sweet face
bent over her, a soft voice was speaking comfort, and a glass of
water cooler and more refreshing than she had ever tasted before
was held to her lips. She was just conscious enough to think that it
was Phebe who ministered to her wants, or some good seraph that
looked as sweetly sad and kind. Then she sunk to sleep, and it was
many weeks before she awoke from the dream that followed.
It was Phebe Gray who stood by the sick bed of the sufferer. A
villager had seen Mrs. Gray’s horse that morning, bridled and with
his saddle on, trampling among the flower beds and feasting upon
the choice rose bushes which grew in the parsonage yard—he went
in to secure the animal and was terrified by the voice of suffering
which issued from the house. He went up stairs, saw the delirious
young creature who occupied the bridal chamber, and hastened to
inform Mrs. Gray—but Phebe had struggled with her own sufferings
and stood over Malina’s sick bed many hours before the mother had
arranged her dress and prepared herself to pass through the village
with that degree of propriety which she considered due to her
character.
Malina lay many weeks before the fever left her; then a cough set
in and a hectic spot settled and burned into her thin cheeks. The
poor girl smiled a sad quiet smile, when she heard them say each
evening, that a little over exertion had excited her, that she had taken
a slight cold which in the turn of her disease was felt more than
usual. Still the cough deepened, the crimson spot burned on, and
she knew that the life which kindled would soon be exhausted. And
so it was, that autumn when the woods were all flushed with those
dyes which an early frost brings to the foliage, when the nuts were
ripe and the brown leaves fell in showers over the crisp moss, Malina

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Rethinking America: From Empire to

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From the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire: Empire

America in the World from Truman to Biden

Ukraine in Transformation : From Soviet Republic to

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 Sandra

Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory John

From slaves to prisoners of war: the Ottoman Empire,

The Muslim Problem: From the British Empire to

Breaking Ground: From Extraction Booms to Mining Bans

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© John M. Murrin 2018

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CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

In fond memory of Edmund S. Morgan

Introduction—The Revolutionary Republic of a Radical, Imperial,

Part II. Toward Revolution

4. Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American

Part III. Defining the Republic

Conclusion—Self-​Immolation: Schools of Historiography

Pr eface and Ack nowledgm ents

x Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

The essays collected in Rethinking America introduce many of the

Civil War–era thinker James Harrington. They did so to provide an alter-

where the most prominent Pennsylvanians in the legislature campaigned

for a growing number of people in the colonies country ideology did

Nowhere in this story is it helpful to distinguish between the consti-

political culture. In the essays in Rethinking America treating the post–

circumstances and conditions the nation-​state could be active and power-

John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole,

6. J.G.A. Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of

“So, Madam, you refuse—my boy is dying, and he yearns to look

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Conclusion—Self-Immolation: Schools of Historiography

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