Richard B. Morris

Andrew Jackson, Strikebreaker

LABOR authorities generally cite the railroad strikes of I877 as the first instance in American history of the calling out of federal troops to intervene in a labor dispute. But the dubious distinction of being the first executive to dispatch federal troops to a strike area has erroneously been conferred upon President Hayes. Some forty-three years before he took such action, Old Hickory, labors true friend according to the portrait limned by twentieth century historians, sent federal troops into Maryland to restrain discontented workmen. The circumstances which called forth President Jacksons hitherto unpublished military order written in his own hand stemmed from difficulties with the Irish laborers recruited for the construction projects on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The belligerent activities of this immigrant labor group in the canal and railroad fields foreshadowed by almost a generation the lawless practices of the Molly Maguires. Normally, strikes and threats of strikes by Irish construction workers could be brought under control by a sheriffs posse or state troops, ringleaders were summarily jailed when identified, and the animosity of Yankee and German laborers to their competitors from the Emerald Isle was capitalized to keep construction projects moving. On occasion Maryland residents even took vigilante action and cleared their communities of all Irish labor, going so far as to tear down the workers shanties. The specific labor incident on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal project which provoked the unprecedented intervention of the federal government originated near Williamsport, Maryland, around January i6, I834. Although contemporary newspaper accounts failed to establish the cause of the disturbance, it is now perfectly clear that the conflict was not the result of irresponsible gang warfare or senseless feuding between North of Ireland

Class Struggle and the American Revolution

HE Richmond Enquirer of May io, i86i, commenting on a statement in a recent Washington Star to the effect that General Winfield Scott, at the age of seventy-six, is true to the principles of 76, declared precisely so-but whose principles of 76? Certainly not those of Virginia, or any one of the old thirteen, for they fought for the right of self-government-a right which Gen. Scott denies, and is endeavoring to prevent the exercise of, by the sword. At the age of 76, Gen. Scott is precisely where every American Tory was found in 76, on the side of the enemies of his own State and people. He is, indeed, true to the Tory principles of 76. A century has elapsed since Fort Sumter, but the nature of the American Revolution is still unsettled. If, with the Richmond Enquirer, we concede that the American Revolution was a war for political independence, self-determination, and states rights, we cannot summarily divest it of its nationalistic and centrifugal character. Similarly, granting its legalistic and constitutional base, we cannot so casually strip it of its egalitarian and democratic impulses. It is two hundred years since James Otis made his renowned writs of assistance speech, since the day when John Adams, with perhaps pardonable exaggeration, declared the child Independence was born. Two hundred years should have brought us perspective and some degree of objectivity toward venerable events. Certainly it seems appropriate that an age swept by political, social, and technological revolution should reexamine that fountainhead of modern revolutionary experience, the American War for Independence, and test anew, on the basis of the most recent evidence, the validity of the hypotheses which varying schools of historiography have fashioned to explain this complex struggle. We have been enlightened by a variety of interpretations of the American Revolution: Whig and Tory, national and imperial, Populist-Progres-

The Spacious Empire of Lawrence Henry Gipson

T TWO noteworthy events make the year i88o distinctive in the annals of American historiography. That patriarch among American historians, George Bancroft, then in his eighty-first year, was busily engaged in preparing his two-volume History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States, which became a part of The Authors Last Revision to appear within a few years. In that same year Lawrence Henry Gipson, the present dean and patriarch of American historians, was born in Greeley, Colorado. I suggest that this is more than coincidence, for something of that quality of timeless energy which Bancroft possessed in full measure seems to have been infused into the bloodstream of our distinguished colleague. One who at the ripe age of eighty-six can demonstrate a capacity, intellectual and physical, to bring to completion a grandiose design might well be compared with that earlier historian, who at the age of eighty-five wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes: On one of the days in which I wrote my little tribute to your Life of Emerson, I was yet strong enough to rise in the night, light my own fire and candles, and labor with close application fully fourteen hours consecutively, that is, from five in the morning till eight in the evening, with but one short hours interruption for breakfast; and otherwise no repast; not so much as a sip of water. To which the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table made a characteristic response: You must be made of iron and vulcanized india-rubber, or some such compound of resistance and elasticity. Now, synthetic chemistry has invented many more compounds than were known in the late Doctor Holmess day. If Lawrence H. Gipson has partaken of these new elixirs, for trade reasons he has kept it a secret. But anyone who for some score of years could survive a daily round-trip commutation stint on the Reading Railroad between Rydal and

The Confederation period and the American historian

PLAUTFUS tells us that one eyewitness is worth ten hearsays, but I am not sure that he would have left us this counsel if he had lived during the Confederation period of American history. In this era the eyewitnesses themselves failed to see eye to eye. In fact, the two opposing views of the post-Revolutionary years which are held by historians of the twentieth century can be traced directly to the Founding Fathers. The first we might call the Washington-Madison-Hamilton approach, accepted by most historians of the post-Revolutionary generation, and developed by George Bancroft, John Fiske, John B. McMaster, and with some reservations by Andrew C. McLaughlin. The other is the approach of certain Antifederalist leaders, an approach adopted by Henry B. Dawson, by J. Allen Smith, by the early Charles A. Beard, and by the more recent Merrill Jensen. If one could read the minds of the majority of the Founding Fathers in I787-and an abundant and ever-increasing quantity of first-hand documentation makes this a less formidable effort than it seems on its face-he might be very much surprised indeed that any issue should have arisen in historiography about the years of the Confederation. The majority of the Founders saw a clear drift toward anarchy culminating in a crisis. Constantly needled by such correspondents as Henry Knox and David Humphreys, Washingtons alarm at the weaknesses of the Confederacy was deepened as the disorders in Massachusetts in the fall of I786 seemed to portend a crisis for the nation. I predict the worst consequences from a half-starved, limping government, always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step, he wrote. On August i, I786, he asserted: I do not conceive we can long exist as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union in as ener-getic a manner as the authority of the State governments extends over the several states. On October 22 he wrote David Humphreys: But for Gods sake tell me what is the cause of all these commotions? ... I am mortified

History Over Time

M ) ~Y love affair with history was the result of shared experience and observation in what has been the best of centuries and the worst of centuries. I was not quite six years old when in June i9io Theodore Roosevelt staged his dramatic return from his safari in Africa. My father hoisted me on his shoulders so that I could see the parade up Fifth Avenue. Later that afternoon I recall there was a violent hailstorm perhaps presaging stormy years ahead for T.R. and the nation he hoped once more to lead. As a high school student at Townsend Harris Hall, I marched down Fifth Avenue in i9i8 along with thousands for both the false armistice and the real one four days later. I was swept into history not only by the stirring events of the World War I years but by the imaginative pedagogy of two of my Townsend Harris Hall teachers, Herman Gray, later a professor of law at New York University Law School, and Austin Baxter Keep, then deep into his researches on the early libraries of colonial New York. My enthusiasm for history was sustained by several members of the faculty of City College, where I pursued my undergraduate studies-notably by Nelson P. Mead and J. Salwyn Schapiro. Mead had recently returned from Paris, where he had been a member of City College president Sidney Mezess Inquiry at the peace conference, and he provided his students with an up-to-date, information-packed and highly systematic version of World War I, without the advantages afforded by hindsight. He was basically a colonial historian who had completed his doctorate at Columbia under Herbert L. Osgood, a profound scholar whose massive institutional history of the American colonies shaped study and teaching for a whole generation. From the Europeanist J. Salwyn Schapiro, I learned to appreciate intellectual and social history, the role played by ideology and isms. Remember, it was a generation when James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard were very much in vogue, and historians were becoming increasingly aware of social and cultural concerns and somewhat less involved in the traditional political framework. If my undergraduate education contributed to my becoming something of a historical maverick for that time, it was in no small part due to the tutelage of Professor Morris Raphael Cohen, the eminent philosopher, whose course in the philosophy of law introduced me to my literary hero, Frederic William Maitland, as well as to a host of modern writers in European juristic thought and legal history. As an undergraduate I had already done enough reading in the sources for American colonial law to have recognized certain fallacies in Roscoe Pounds Spirit of the Common