Edmund Sears Morgan (January 17, 1916 – July 8, 2013) was an American historian and an authority on early American history. He was the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American colonial history, with some attention to English history. Thomas S. Kidd says he was noted for his incisive writing style, "simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced." He covered many topics, including Puritanism, political ideas, the American Revolution, slavery, historiography, family life, and numerous notables such as Benjamin Franklin.
Early life and education Morgan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the second child of Edmund Morris Morgan and Elsie Smith Morgan. His mother was from a Yankee family that practiced Christian Science, though she distanced herself from that faith. His father, descended from Welsh coal miners, taught law at the University of Minnesota. His sister was Roberta Mary Morgan (later Wohlstetter), also a historian and, like Edmund, a winner of the Bancroft Prize.
In 1925, the family moved from Washington, D.C., to Arlington, Massachusetts, when their father was appointed a professor at Harvard Law School.
Morgan attended Belmont Hill School in Belmont, Massachusetts, and then enrolled at Harvard College, where he initially intended to study English history and literature. But after taking a course in American literature with F. O. Matthiessen, he switched to the new major of American civilization (history and literature), with Perry Miller as his tutor. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1937. Then, at the urging of the jurist and family friend Felix Frankfurter, Morgan began attending lectures at the London School of Economics.
In 1942, Morgan earned his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University with Miller as his adviser.
Military service Although a pacifist, Morgan became convinced after the fall of France in June 1940 that only military force could stop Hitler, and he withdrew his application for conscientious objector status. During World War II, he trained as a machinist at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he turned out parts for radar installations.
Personal life and death In 1939, he married Helen Theresa Mayer, who died in 1982.
Morgan died in New Haven, Connecticut on July 8, 2013, at the age of 97. His cause of death was pneumonia. He was survived by two daughters—Penelope Aubin and Pamela Packard—from his first marriage; his second wife, Marie (née Carpenter) Caskey Morgan, a historian; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Career In 1946–55, Morgan taught history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island before becoming a professor at Yale University, where he directed some 60 PhD dissertations in colonial history before retiring in 1986.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Morgan was profoundly influenced by historian Perry Miller, who became a lifelong friend. Although both were atheists, they had a deep understanding and respect for Puritan religion.Courtland, pp 349–50 From Miller, Morgan learned to appreciate:
The intellectual rigor and elegance of a system of ideas that made sense of human life in a way no longer palatable to most of us. Certainly not palatable to me... He left me with a habit of taking what people have said at face value unless I find compelling reasons to discount it... What Americans said from the beginning about taxation and just government deserved to be taken as seriously as the Puritans' ideas about God and man.
Morgan's many books and articles covered a range of topics in the history of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, using intellectual, social history, biographical, and political history approaches. Two of his early books, The Birth of the Republic (1956) and The Puritan Dilemma (1958), have for decades been required reading in many undergraduate history courses. His works include American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), which won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Historical Association's Charles S. Sydnor Prize and the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award, and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989. Morgan wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin in which he made extensive use of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. He also wrote biographies on Ezra Stiles and Roger Williams.
Puritans Morgan's trio The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in 17th-Century New England (1944), The Puritan Dilemma (1958), and Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1963) restored the intellectual respectability of the Puritans, and revealed their appetite for healthy sex, causing a renaissance in Puritan studies, partly because both Morgan and his mentor Miller were Ivy League atheist professors, which added to their credibility. Visible Saints, dedicated to Miller, was a reinterpretation of the Puritan ideal of the "Church of the Elect." Morgan argued that the criterion for church membership was not fixed in England. Soon after their arrival in the Colonies, the Puritans restricted membership to a gathered church composed exclusively of tested Saints.
Morgan's 1958 book The Puritan Dilemma raised his status in the public consciousness, and the book became the most assigned textbook in U.S. history survey courses, documenting the change in understanding among Puritans of what it means to be a member of a church. Morgan described the Puritan as "doing right in a world that does wrong...Caught between the ideals of God's Law and the practical needs of the people, John Winthrop walked a line few could tread."
American Revolution In The Stamp Act Crisis (1953) and The Birth of the Republic (1956) Morgan rejected the Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution and its assumption that the rhetoric of the Patriots was mere rhetorical bluster. Instead Morgan returned to the interpretation first set out by George Bancroft a century before that the patriots were deeply motivated by a commitment to liberty. Historian Mark Egnal argues that:
The leading neo-Whig historians, Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn, underscore this dedication to whiggish principles, although with variant readings. For Morgan, the development of the patriots' beliefs was a rational, clearly defined process.
Slavery In his 1975 book American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan explored "the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom":
Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book.
Morgan claimed that large Virginia plantation owners exerted an outsized influence on poorer white Virginians and their attitude toward the racial divide (color line) which made it possible for Virginian white men as a group to become more politically equal: ("Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one").
In a controversial passage, Morgan suggests Virginia's poor whites felt no racial superiority to poor blacks. He does this by providing evidence that, in 17th-century Virginia, poor white indentured servants and black slaves frequently cooperated with each other and worked together. Morgan cites the 1676 Bacon's Rebellion as evidence of a surprising racial egalitarianism among the poor, since Bacon incorporated runaway black slaves into his army.
Despite the assertions of such writers as Michelle Alexander,"The systematic enslavement of Africans ... emerged with all deliberate speed – quickened by events such as Bacon's Rebellion.... In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves." however, Morgan does not state that Bacon's Rebellion was the reason that rich landowners stopped purchasing white indentured servants and started increasing their purchase of black slaves; rather, regional changes in labor economics was the reason black slaves began to replace white servants: during the early 1600s, white servants cost less per unit labor than black slaves did; but by the latter 1600s, the situation reversed itself, and black slaves became the more economical investment."Why… did Virginians not furnish themselves with slaves as soon as they began to grow tobacco? Why did they wait so long [to import large numbers of black slaves]? The answer lies in the fact that slave labor… was actually not as advantageous as indentured labor during the first half of the century… The point at which it became more advantageous for Virginians to buy slaves was probably reached by 1660." And, as Morgan states, "The planters who bought slaves instead of servants did not do so with any apparent consciousness of the social stability to be gained thereby. Indeed, insofar as Virginians expressed themselves on the subject of slavery, they feared that it would magnify the danger of insurrection in the colony." As events evolved, however, the rising number of black slaves and the virtual end to the importation of indentured servants did stabilize Virginia society. And as time went on, according to Morgan, Virginia politicians learned to further pacify poor whites by fostering a sense of white superiority. "If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism." "Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty." That is, according to Morgan, white men in Virginia were able to become much more politically equal and cohesive than would have been possible without a population of low-status black slaves.Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom p. 386
Anthony S. Parent commented: "American historians of our generation admire Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom more than any other monograph. Morgan resuscitated American history by placing black slavery and white freedom as its central paradox."
In 2002 Morgan published a surprise New York Times Bestseller, Benjamin Franklin, which dispels the myth of "a comfortable old gentleman staring out at the world over his half-glasses with benevolent comprehension of everything in it", revealing his true mental makeup.
With a wisdom about himself that comes only to the great of heart, Franklin knew how to value himself and what he did without mistaking himself for something more than one man among many. His special brand of self-respect required him to honor his fellow men and women no less than himself.
Legacy and impact After examining his writings, University of North Florida historian wrote David T. Courtwright wrote that:
They are based on exhaustive research in primary sources; emphasize human agency as against historicist forces; and are written in precise and graceful prose. This combination of rigor, empathy, and lucidity is intended for, and has succeeded in capturing, a broad audience. Morgan is read by secondary school students, undergraduates, and graduate students, as well as by his specialist peers – some sixty of whom were trained in his seminars.David T. Courtwright, "Fifty Years of American History: An Interview with Edmund S. Morgan", William and Mary Quarterly (1987): p. 336.