The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown

Radical History and the Early Republic

Mark Kamrath

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781606350324
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612775487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: Literature

A new perspective on the cultural politics of Charles Brockden Brown

The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the most accomplished literary figure in early America, redefined the gothic genre and helped shape some of America's greatest writers, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, little has been said about the latter years of Brown's career. While his early novels are celebrated for their innovative and experimental style, Brown's later historical narratives are often dismissed as uninteresting, and Brown himself has been accused of having become "a stodgy conservative."

Through a re-examination of these neglected historical writings, Mark L. Kamrath takes a fresh look at Brown's later career and his role in the cultural politics of the early national period. This interdisciplinary study uses transatlantic historical contexts and recent narrative discourse to unveil Brown's philosophic inquires into the filiopietistic tradition of historiography and increasingly imperialistic notion of American exceptionalism. It recovers a forgotten debate—and radical position—about the nature of historical truth and representation and opens up for contemporary discussion what it means to write about the past.

Part 1

Remembering the Past

Chapter 1

European and Colonial Traditions

At the very center of the professional historical venture is the idea and ideal of “objectivity.” It was the rock on which the venture was constituted, its continuing raison d’être. It has been the quality which the profession has prized and praised above all others—whether in historians or in their works. It has been the key term in defining progress in historical scholarship: moving ever closer to the objective truth about the past. Anyone interested in what professional historians are up to—what they think they are doing, or ought to be doing, when they write history—might well begin by considering “the objectivity question.”

—Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (1988)

If Brown, as his contemporaries assert, had a capacity for “fancy” and “imagination” yet “patiently enquired . . . read, reflected, examined and compared, opposing facts and arguments,” it is worth investigating what exactly such traits meant in Brown’s time and how they relate to the idea that he “seemed more to write in the style of an historian of past ages, than the recorder of those passing occurrences that tincture our public councils, and embitter the charities of domestic life.”¹ For, if as his contemporaries suggest, Brown, who was raised as a Quaker, was not merely reporting or describing passing events, then he was, it would seem, instead bringing a degree of philosophic candor and analysis to those events, especially in terms of cause and effect. Such analysis or pursuit of truth amid conflicting circumstances and evidence invites inquiry into what political, cultural, philosophical, and even familial forces shaped Brown’s concept of history and enabled him to think and write “in the style of an historian of past ages.”

That is, in addition to clarifying what was meant by historical “objectivity” in Brown’s time, inquiry into the cultural milieu of his era illuminates the ways Brown’s historiography related to, and was eventually at odds with, a providential or filiopietistic tradition of historical writing that privileged assumptions of providential design and, often, national destiny. Brown’s affiliation with “an historian of past ages” or a generation of historians whose own methods of historical representation arguably anticipate elements of late Enlightenment historiography raises provocative questions about the evolution of modern “objectivity,” and more recent claims at the end of the twentieth century about the final arrival and practice of a “bottom-up” history, historical self-consciousness or constructionism, and “truth”—issues I also examine in later chapters.

If, as Novick suggests, the “idea and ideal of ‘objectivity’” is indeed at the center of modern historiography, it is useful then to examine those traditions as Brown inherited them and to try and discern how Brown himself negotiated the “the objectivity question.” For if representing the past objectively as possible is the “continuing raison d’être,” it is also one of the primary criteria by which not only Brown’s contributions but also those of other historians should be measured. While it is beyond the scope of this study to comprehensively reassess whole generations of historians, in the case of Brown, I want to argue, scholars of American historiography have inaccurately recorded and judged the experimental historiographical efforts of Brown’s era. Indeed, filiopietistic principles and practices Brown engaged—and ultimately broke away from—are illustrative of the period’s ideological deep structure and construction of the past. Brown’s freethinking, Quaker engagement with history forces us to rethink assumptions and clichés about early American historiography, and, equally as important, truth claims about historical consciousness associated with the rise of modern history writing. As Eileen Ka-May Cheng argues about antebellum historiography that focused on the American Revolution, “modern historians have not advanced beyond their early nineteenth-century predecessors as much as they would like to think they have.” These early historians “anticipated many of the concerns of modern historians and the sophistication and complexity of their ideas about truth.”²

European History

In considering how classical historians approached history, Harry Elmer Barnes importantly remarks that while the birth of historical writing is often associated with Greece and Homer’s poems, the qualities of objectivity and analysis usually associated with historical inquiry and representation can be traced to the emergence of “speculative Ionic philosophy.”³

The beginnings of “free thought and critical philosophy” emerge in fifth-century Ionia, where Greeks such as Hecataeus identified two elements of modern historicism in Genealogies: “setting up truth as the test of his statements and assuming a frankly critical attitude toward the conventional Greek creation myths.”⁴ Along with an interest in geographical and genealogical origins, these early philosophers used “reason” and “free speculation” to interrogate conventional mythologies about Greek beginnings and, in effect, the cultural status quo.⁵

Greek historians like Herodotus (ca. 484–425 b.c.), Thucydides (ca. 456–396 b.c.), and Polybius (ca. 203–120 b.c.) also variously aspired toward impartiality and fairness in the reconstruction of historical events and their causes.⁶ Of Herodotus, for instance, Maurice Croiset has written that he traveled much and sought to “inform[ ] himself about everything, about customs, laws, forms of government, and religions, without preconceived ideas and prejudices, but with a singular mixture of acuteness and credulity, of insatiable curiosity and religious discretion.”⁷ In his History and account of the Persian wars, Herodotus could have indulged a patriotic bias in favor of the Greeks but instead analyzed the clash of Hellenic and Persian cultures, only occasionally relying on supernatural intervention as a way of explaining causes and effects.⁸ According to Donald Lateiner, however, Herodotus tried to provide a “studiously fair account” of historical events and often indicated “the limits of his knowledge” or his “uncertainty.” Just as Herodotus anticipates Gibbon and his use of irony, so his History also avoids a teleological approach to the past and is absent of “a single ‘systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning.’”⁹ Likewise, if Thucydides wrote more “contemporary history” and considered more fully issues of “historical and political causation,” Polybius, remarks Barnes, “came closer to the ideal of impartiality in treating Greek and Roman history than any other historical writer of antiquity.” His interest in causation and effect and sound historical method is, in general, a legacy of the period.¹⁰

Importantly, then, if establishing what was meant by saying Brown wrote in a style of “past historians” means understanding that such a remark references early Greek and Roman historians and conceptions of impartiality, Brown, like these early philosophers, wrote history in a mode that was, for its time, a secular and innovative departure from the existing cultural mythos. The remark, in other words, in Brown’s obituary that he wrote in the manner of a historian from past ages suggests that Brown’s spirit of inquiry and search for knowledge, general analysis, and attempts at impartiality departed, quite radically, from historiographical standards and methods in his day and recalled the historicism of an earlier period. If true, Brown’s historical method and attempts to represent the past objectively not only have a unique and, arguably, radical Greek analogue but raise provocative questions about what exactly late Enlightenment historiography accomplished relative to “the objectivity question.” Were histories written during the Enlightenment informed, as most scholars assume, by reason and objectivity, or were they somehow lacking in those more modern qualities? Did early American historiography by writers such as Mercy Otis Warren objectively represent the past, or did it understand events as part of a larger providential, teleological design?

Greek analysis favored accuracy and was generally imitated by the Romans until Christianity and religious bias in the Middle Ages affected Western historical writing. The resulting histories tended to be teleological and to privilege theological and allegorical explanations of the past that justified progress to the present. However, it was not until Enlightenment science and rationalism took hold that historiographical practice would return to its roots.¹¹ As part of a reaction to the doctrinal or providential historical writing of the Middle Ages, the idea of rational “objectivity” was, in other words, central to Enlightenment historiography.

George H. Callcott concurs, observing how late Enlightenment philosophers and historians developed scholarly principles and introduced the idea of progress into history writing. Giambattista Vico especially influenced the historical writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon—works that Brown either read or reviewed during his lifetime. Vico, explains Callcott, thought history was meaningful only when the historian went beyond the mere chronicling of an event and connected it to society itself.

When the historian grasped the totality of man’s achievement—his laws, manners, institutions, and culture—then the past becomes understandable and historical knowledge useful. Vico called upon historians to cultivate a self-conscious method—a “scientific” method—for arriving at truth about the past. The method really only amounted to a conscious effort at objectivity. The historian must ask whether a fact were reasonable, if it were relevant to a larger truth, if witnesses were reliable; he must be aware of his own biases and his own standard of judgment.

Regardless of the historian’s “effort at objectivity,” suggests Callcott, the themes he included or excluded in his history reveal ideological inclinations, or the presence of private and public biases. Similarly to how works like Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (1748) and Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV (1751) applied a “scientific” or objective point of view, histories by men like Turgot, Condorcet, Priestly, and Godwin also espoused various concepts of human “progress.” English historians Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon have, for example, variously incorporated the idea of secular progress into history. While Hume searched for “causation—or theme—in the affairs of men,” Gibbon wrote of the triumph of religious superstition, and Robertson’s histories tended to acknowledge the providence of God in historical events—an approach that made his histories popular in America.¹²

During the eighteenth century, however, late Enlightenment ideas in historiography about reason, natural laws and progress, and the moral and literary appeal of history entered a period, observes Hayden White, when Europeans disagreed about “the proper attitude with which to approach the study of history.” In response to the embrace of rationalism in historiography, critics such as Johann Gottfried Herder moved toward “‘empathy’ as a method of historical inquiry” and acknowledged those elements of the past that had been ignored by Enlightenment historians. “Enlighteners,” writes White, “never rose to full awareness of the creative possibilities contained in their own Ironic apprehension of the ‘fictive’ nature of historical reflection.”¹³ Instead, they were skeptical of any historical truths contained in myths, legends, or fables. As I argue elsewhere, Pierre Bayle’s, Godwin’s, and Brown’s philosophical reflections on the nature of history and fiction qualify these observations, but by and large White’s characterization of late Enlightenment ambivalence over historiographical method is accurate.

In particular, Herder, along with other German historical thinkers, put forth an organic, teleological model of history—one that questioned the idea of historical events or the past being separate from the present and instead saw history as contributing to, and defining, the present.¹⁴ If rationalist historians looked down upon medievalism and believed in “progress as a law of history,” so romanticists, he said, “stressed the organic wholeness” of historical evolution.¹⁵ Toward this end, Herder strove in Yet Another Philosophy of History (1776) for a higher degree of historical empathy, emphasizing the need to focus more closely on facts and to place greater emphasis on individuals and on what was “local.”¹⁶ While rationalist historians viewed history as the “accidental result of cumulative cultural progress,” Herder identified providential purpose as informing or connecting historical events.¹⁷ As with the romantic movement elsewhere, the emphasis on feeling or empathy and providential design was, in part, a reevaluation of medieval values and central to Herder’s and others’ understanding of historical development. It was a clash of ideas that Brown would immerse himself in intellectually, especially after 1800, when he turned from novels to political and historical writing.

In England the response by historical writers to late Enlightenment rationalism was less pronounced than it was in Germany. English literary writers, of course, such as Wordsworth, developed an aesthetic in reaction to neoclassicist ideals, but historical writers were slower to absorb rationalist conceptions of history. Edmund Burke, for example, while not typically considered a romanticist or a historiographer, refuted tenets of rationalism in his political writings and in putting together his Annual Register, which he edited until 1788, defended a “conservation of the accumulated achievements of the past and condemned the rationalists for their disdain of history.”¹⁸ Not until historians such as John Whitaker, John Pinkerton, and Sharon Turner published their histories on Britain’s Anglo-Saxon past could one identify anti-Enlightenment tendencies in English historical writing.¹⁹ Of course, beyond the achievements of Wordsworth, writers like Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey wrote historical novels that were part of the English revival of the past. But British historiographical achievements in the first half of the nineteenth century remained sparse, highlighted by the didactic studies of Thomas Macauly and Thomas Carlyle and, later, James Anthony Froude’s twelve-volume History of England.

Contemporary historiographical scholarship has loosened its “objectivist creed” and recognized the role of ideological preconceptions and bias in writing history, but historians like Novick are accurate in saying that the objectivist point of view has remained “the key term in defining progress in historical scholarship.” Even today, the avoidance of partisanship or bias in one’s narration reigns supreme, and the historian is, like his classical counterparts, expected to conduct empirical research into the past and render the results with neutrality or impartiality. While Novick concentrates on “historians of some consequence or visibility” during the last hundred years, hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Remembering the Past
• Part 2: Historiography and the “Art of the Historian”
• Part 3: The Politics of History
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index