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  • Experience Must Be Our Only Guide (History May Mislead Us)
  • Melvin Yazawa (bio)
Peter C. Messer. Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. x + 258 pp. Appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00.

In his seminal examination of "history" and "experience" in the eighteenth century, Douglass G. Adair argues convincingly that the American Revolutionaries often used these terms interchangeably because they tended not to differentiate between "wisdom gained by participation in events, and wisdom gained by studying past events." Thus John Dickinson's classic statement in the Constitutional Convention ("Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.") was an endorsement rather than a dismissal of the relevance of historical studies.1 Peter C. Messer offers an addendum to Adair's thesis: in constructing their own accounts, provincial and Revolutionary historians favored the promotion of "new identities as distinct peoples" over wisdom, however gained (p. 3).

Based primarily on a close reading of fifty-three histories published between 1705 and 1817, starting with Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia and ending with David Ramsay's three-volume History of the United States, Messer argues that provincial historians succeeded in "craft[ing] a distinct American identity" that not only influenced the course of the Revolution but resulted in a "uniquely North American vision of republican politics" (p. 3). By emphasizing "common standards and behaviors associated with a distinctive place," these historians, "self-styled Americans" who relied heavily on Scottish political and social theorists, established a vision of the past that "laid the foundations for an American identity long before independence" (pp. 6, 12, 6). As such, they "provided the crucial component for transforming resistance to unpopular imperial policies into a revolution" (p. 3). And after independence, the extension of the sense of a "shared past" and "pride of place" combined to form an American brand of republicanism amid the confusing "variety of forms" comprising eighteenth-century republican ideology (pp. 6, 4).

In making this case for the "central role" of historical studies in "creating a national identity," Messer claims that provincial historians advanced four [End Page 18] factors that came to "symbolize the unique qualities of American life": the development of stable families, the pursuit of economic opportunities, salutary interventions of providence, and the benevolent influence of nature (pp. 7, 24, 33). When filtered through the prism of the Scottish Enlightenment's idea that "communities evolved over time in a linear pattern of progress and improvement," these "American" ingredients filled the colonists with "pride" because they realized that "their communities . . . [were] distinct from the empire as a whole" (pp. 19, 13). That all of this was evident "by the eighteenth century," that by then "many colonists" had begun to identify themselves with one another on the basis of their "peculiar experiences in the New World and not by their ties to the Old World," established "an essential context for how Americans understood" their Revolution (pp. 4, 73).

Imperial measures after the French and Indian War represented a threat to the colonists' "identities as Americans" (p. 5). To those immersed in the world created by the provincial historians, the actions of a jealously fearful Parliament betrayed a "profound hostility to the progress of history" (p. 79). Americans may have employed a "variety of languages" in reaction to repeated efforts to tax them against their consent, but when they resorted to Lockean ideas of rights "grounded in a contractual agreement" between rulers and ruled, the "people did not respond" (p. 75). Only when "authors" interpreted the imperial crisis from the perspective of historical "assumptions of provincial identities" did the independence movement take off (p. 95). Indeed, having adopted the notion that the orderly progress and improvement of their society was divinely and naturally ordained, American patriots saw the actions of king and Parliament as a giant "conspiracy to undermine the evolution of the state of society in America" (p. 78). Convinced that the "future improvement of American society" rested in the balance, "Patriot authors" thus instigated "a revolution in defense of history" (pp. 79, 73).

In the immediate postwar years, as optimistic assumptions about orderly progress was contradicted...

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