Colonial America
THERE has been in America a reaction against the "good thing" school of historiography and againit the imputation to the early settlers of virtues, achievements and views that it would be most surprising if they had possessed. Now there is time for a reaction against the reaction, and this admirable piece of popularisation is proof that historiography does make progress. For Professor Wright is' a cool scholar, with an eye for proportion and a capacity for critical judgement that enables him to thread his way through a most complicated history and keep his own—and his reader's—eye on the main theme, the establishment of the thirteen English colonies that became the United States.
The thirteen English colonies. Of course, the colonists were not all English by a long way, but institutionally, culturally, even theologically, English predominance is marked. It was, therefore; an excellent idea to get the Master of St. John's, Cambridge, to write a long and stimulating introduction to the strange eventful history told by Professor Wright. Here we have the European and English matrix described in a masterly fashion, and then Professor Wright takes.np a tale that he makes fascinating without any sacrifice of scholarship. His secret is, of course, in part his own load of learning lightly borne, but it is also in part a sympathetic understanding of the needs and limitations of the common reader knowing little or nothing of the details of the story and in danger of being drowned in minutae or bored to sleep by generalities. Professor Wright has the most happy knack of illustrating some general process by an apposite and often novel example. All the problems of settlement and expansion are illustrated by concrete and vivid examples, often by happy quotation from contemporaries. And all the time a fine critical scholarship is at work guiding and controlling the narrative.
Professor Wright, like most modern scholars, will have none of the importation into the 'seventeenth century of modem political and
social ideas ; here is no picture of a democratic and a reactionary party at grips in Virginia or even in Massachusetts. But he does not suspend moral judgement, and he is severe, perhaps too severe, on the Massachusetts Bay colony. One may hazard a guess that he is no great lover of any rulers professing to know and impose the will of the Almighty. But harsh and odious as was the treatment meted out to dissenters in Massachusetts, there was no real equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, and Mrs. Hutchinson, unlike St. Joan, was exiled, not burned alive. Even the Salem witches were hanged not burned, despite popular belief to the contrary. Virginia seems to be Professor Wright's favourite colony with Pennsylvania a good second, but again there is no nonsense about the aristocratic origin of the First Families or concealment of Quaker intellectual torpor and political smugness.
All the colonists except the Quakers had great sins to answer for in their treatment of the Indians, the South Carolinians more than most. It is almost with satisfaction that one reads of a rascally•slave- raider being broiled for three days by the revolted Indians ! And, we are reminded, some of the revenue for George Whitefield's famous orphanage came from the profits of a slave plantation ! Every aspect of colonial life is covered from cod-fishing to the founding of the St. Cecilia Society of Charleston. There are a number of minor slips, almost all in references to the European background, but none matter, except, possibly, the implication that hogs stopped running round New York streets in the eighteenth century ; they were one of the sights of Broadway until well into the nineteenth. D. W. BROGAN.
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