Calvinist Metaphysics to Republican Theory: Jonathan Edwards and James Dana on Freedom of the Will

The Reverend Mr. James Dana, the pastor of the First Church in Wallingford, Connecticut, had never before attempted to pick a quarrel with his old friend and ally, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College. But in the winter of 1782 what was happening at Yale passed all the bounds of propriety and friendship. I have understood that Mr. Edwards\u27s book on fatality was laid aside some years since at your university, Dana wrote (not stopping to add what he surely must have thought, and good riddance too); but now, it gave me pain to hear lately that the divinity professor, the epileptic Samuel Wales, particularly recommends this book to the young gentlemen who are studying divinity under his direction. Have you forgotten, Dana irritably asked, what kind of damage Jonathan Edwards and his Careful and Strict Enquiry in the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Reward and Punishment had done since the book appeared in 1754? I need not say to you, sir, that it has been the root of bitterness which has troubled us...like Achan in the camp of Israel, Hopkintonianism, Westianism, and Schism are grafted upon it. It promoted fatalism and mechanism, and if mechanism doth not explode moral good and evil, I have not the slightest pretence to any mental discernment. Not only mechanism and fatalism, Murrayism, Deism, and atheism also sprang indiscriminately from the head of Edwards\u27s book; Dana even blamed the sensational murder-suicide of William Beadle that summer on the principles of Mr. Edwards\u27s system. Suppress the book, Dana pleaded, interpose your good influence, that so dangerous a book be not introduced into college again. [excerpt

What if the South had Won the Civil War? 4 Sci-Fi Scenarios for HBO\u27s \u27Confederate\u27

“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections. (excerpt

The Rusher Who Wouldn\u27t Take the Knee

No law requires the playing of the National Anthem at the outset of professional sporting events. Also, no law requires people to stand when the anthem is played, or that people to sing along—although federal law does mandate that we “should face the flag and stand at attention . . . right hand over the heart,” and that “men not in uniform . . . should remove their headdress with their right hand” (36 U.S. Code § 301). But there is nothing in the statute which says that one cannot use posture as a means for what ESPN called “demonstrating for social justice.” So it is not clear what daring thing the owners, coaches, and players of the National Football League thought they were doing Sunday when they collectively took a knee or raised clenched fists while the “The Star Spangled Banner” was played. (excerpt

Gettysburg Valor Honored At Last

There is no expiration date on valor. This is the lesson on display today at the White House, as President Obama awards the Medal of Honor to a soldier who died 151 years ago at the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg. Alonzo Cushing was a lowly lieutenant, two years out of West Point at that battle. But he commanded the last two cannon that faced Pickett\u27s Charge, and what he did with them has kept memory alive. [excerpt

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt

An impartial history of American statesmanship will give some of its most brilliant chapters to the Whig party from 1830 to 1850, wrote James G. Blaine in his memoirs. This was not, unhappily, because of a great heritage of political achievement in American public life. The work of the Whigs was, as Blaine admitted, negative and restraining rather than constructive. Still, if their work cannot be traced in the National statute books as prominently as that of their opponents, they will be credited by the discriminating reader of our political annals as the English of to-day credit Charles James Fox and his Whig associates—for the many evils they prevented. If that is true, then we have not had very much in the way of impartial histories of American politics since Blaine\u27s day. No major political movement—and a party which elected three presidents and nurtured a fourth over the span of twenty-two years can hardly be put down as minor—has suffered more sheer dismissal, more impatient contempt at the hands of political historians than the American Whigs of 1834 to 1856. This purging of the Whigs from historical respectability really began in Blaine\u27s own lifetime, in the tart push-off made by Henry Adams in his Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), that Of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas. Never mind that Adams\u27s grandfather had been one of the founders of the Whigs and one of those rare intellectuals who managed to sit in both Congress and the White House. And it continued into the twentieth century, where the political history of the pre-Civil War years was dominated by the figure of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and his The Age of Jackson (1945), a book whose title deftly managed to identify the era of the Whigs by the name of their great political Satan. At best in these accounts, neither Whigs nor Democrats were distinguished by much which passed for a political philosophy; at worst, the Whigs were the party of old-fogeyism or unburied Federalism. [excerpt

Lincoln and Leadership: An Afterword

Lincoln and Leadership offers fresh perspectives on the 16th president—making novel contributions to the scholarship of one of the more studied figures of American history. The book explores Lincoln’s leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian. Taken together, the essays suggest the interplay of military, political, and religious factors informing Lincoln’s thought and action and guiding the dynamics of his leadership. The contributors, all respected scholars of the Civil War era, focus on several critical moments in Lincoln’s presidency to understand the ways Lincoln understood and dealt with such issues and concerns as emancipation, military strategy, relations with his generals, the use of black troops, party politics and his own re-election, the morality of the war, the place of America in God’s design, and the meaning and obligations of sustaining the Union. Overall, they argue that Lincoln was simultaneously consistent regarding his commitments to freedom, democratic government, and Union but flexible, and sometimes contradictory, in the means to preserve and extend them. They further point to the ways that Lincoln’s decision making defined the presidency and recast understandings of American “exceptionalism.” They emphasize that the “real” Lincoln was an unabashed party man and shrewd politician, a self-taught commander-in-chief, and a deeply religious man who was self-confident in his ability to judge men and to persuade them with words but unsure of what God demanded from America for its collective sins of slavery. Randall Miller’s Introduction in particular provides essential weight to the notion that Lincoln’s presidential leadership must be seen as a series of interlocking stories. In the end, the contributors collectively remind readers that the Lincoln enshrined as the “Great Emancipator” and “savior of the Union” was in life and practice a work-in-progress. And they insist that “getting right with Lincoln” requires seeing the intersections of his—and America’s—military, political, and religious interests and identities. [From the publisher

The History of Reconstruction’s Third Phase

There is no Society for Historians of Reconstruction. That should tell you something. There are also no Reconstruction re-enactments, and no museums teeming with artifacts of Reconstruction. Because what, after all, would there be for us to re-enact? The Memphis race massacre of May 1-3, 1866? And what artifacts would we be proud to display? Original Ku Klux Klan outfits (much more garish than the bland white-sheet versions of the 1920s)? Serial-number-identified police revolvers from the New Orleans’ Mechanics Institute killings of July 30, 1866? Looked at coldly, the dozen years that we conventionally designate as “Reconstruction” constitute the bleakest failure in American history, and they are all the more bleak for squatting, head-in-hands, between the towering drama of the Civil War and the savage conflicts of the Gilded Age. As a nation, we delivered four million African American slaves from bondage, at the hideous cost of a generation of American youth and the murder of our greatest president -- and then allowed the freedpeople to slip back into the leering control of the same Southern white ruling class which had caused the war in the first place. If slavery was the birth defect of the American founding, Reconstruction was its principal malpractice case. Reconstruction’s historiography has not been much more cheerful. Despite its deformations, Reconstruction was actually one of the first subjects to become the focus of an entire school of professional historical practice, in this case the “school” created by William Archibald Dunning at Columbia University before the First World War and the students (and dissertations) he guided into explorations of Reconstruction in the former Confederate States. [excerpt

Book Review: Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement

“There is a clause in the Act which is likely to meet with misconstruction in Europe,” wrote Frederick Milnes Edge about the legislation that emancipated the slaves of the District of Columbia in April 1862, “namely the appropriation for colonizing the freed slaves.” Ignore it, Edge advised. It only “was adopted to silence the weak-nerved, whose name is legion—and to enable any of the slaves who see fit to emigrate to more genial climes.” And this, for a long time, has been the way that most commentators have understood colonization—a plan ostensibly designed to expatriate any emancipated blacks to Africa or the West Indies or South America, but offered mostly as a placebo to reassure nervous white Americans that their hiring halls and neighborhoods would not be swamped with cheap (and presumably undesirable) freedmen. [excerpt

Lincoln and Justice for All

“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so that the economy is “good for everybody.” The plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher, was less than thrilled by the implications of spreading the wealth, since his fear was that much of the wealth the president-to-be proposed to spread around was the plumber’s. But that has done nothing to give pause to President Obama’s determination to answer the “call to justice and fairness.” In his 2009 Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the president described justice and fairness—the “sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility for ourselves and one another”—as “the very definition of being American.” [excerpt

Book Review: Lincoln and His Books

“I have found no one to speak of Lincoln as a man of either capacity or patriotism,” smirked Confederate general Lafayette McLaws, as the Army of Northern Virginia prepared to march into Pennsylvania on June 28, 1863. His was not, unhappily, an opinion limited to Abraham Lincoln’s enemies-in-arms. Henry Clay Whitney admitted that, at best, Lincoln “had the appearance of a rough intelligent farmer.” Elihu Washburne agreed: meeting Lincoln on the railroad platform in Washington, D.C., on February 23, 1861, Washburne could not help thinking that Lincoln “looked more like a well-to-do farmer from one of the back towns of Jo Davies’s county than the President of the United States.” His own soldiers had some difficulty taking seriously a man who presented such “an odd figure on a horse, and the odder for wearing a stovepipe hat that increased his height and angularity.” The more educated the observer, the lower the opinion seemed to be. A Pennsylvania College student who listened to Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address was, forty years later, still put off by the way Lincoln appeared on the platform, “with his arms hanging at his side at full length and holding a slip of paper with both hands on which was written his three minute address, which had been prepared, according to report then current, on his way from Washington.” Newspaper editors foamed angrily over Lincoln’s election, asking, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” And the intolerably well-educated George Bancroft burst out, in a letter to his wife, “We suffer for want of an organising mind at the head of the government. We have a president without brains.” [excerpt