David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (review)

One central truism about historical scholarship is challenged head-on by Mark Spencer's new book. This is that all answers are necessarily provisional, subject to endless adjustment and further revision in the light of subsequent evidence and refinements in argument. That David Hume in Eighteenth-Century America is likely to brook no such contingency will be obvious to all who read it. For with exemplary commitment to the recovery and analysis of previously unknown data, it will scotch forever a series of assumptions, important to an understanding of the relationship between the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Revolution, that have hitherto enjoyed remarkable currency.

The key claim that Spencer exposes to critical scrutiny, and then proceeds comprehensively to demolish with overwhelming empirical force, is the belief that eighteenth-century Americans either did not know much about David Hume's writings or else flatly rejected the intellectual credentials of this most sceptical of contemporary philosophers and historians. The fons et origo of this emphasis upon Hume's peripheral role in revolutionary America is undoubtedly an eminent one. Indeed, it was none other than Thomas Jefferson himself, who famously, in a judgment repeatedly cited by modern scholars, maintained that the Scot's ideas were both pernicious and fundamentally flawed. Yet Jefferson's views, as Spencer shows, although at their most vitriolic and dismissive after 1807, had evolved in significant ways over time.

Curiously, Jefferson had been a frequent and enthusiastic reader of Hume's History of England in particular between the 1760s and the 1780s. He even bought his own copy of a new edition of that work for the library at Monticello as late as 1791. Rather, his later distaste was actually the result of his growing unease at the sheer attractiveness of Hume's political ideas to so many contemporary Americans, as well as fear of their seductive power in potentially reinforcing Tory principles in the newly-independent country. To Jefferson, Hume, whom he had once read sympathetically, had increasingly come to seem a substantial threat to the republic.

The cornerstone of Spencer's case against taking the Jeffersonian rejection of Hume at face value is an exhaustive study of the publication history and American reception of Hume's writings through the second half of the eighteenth century. Based on an analysis of the holdings of works by individuals and institutions, he is able to demonstrate conclusively, and to provide in his Appendix A a systematic presentation of the evidence, that Hume's output was not only thoroughly familiar but also entirely welcome to very many Americans. From 1750, when the Charleston Library Society in South Carolina received its copy of the Philosophical Essays (1748)—the first recorded Hume text in the colonies—to the late 1820s, when libraries as different as that of the undergraduate Linonian Society at Yale and the town library at Roxbury, Massachusetts, had copies of the History, it is clear that American readers of all descriptions regarded Hume's works as amongst the most popular, attractive and instructive works of the age.

Appendix B, meanwhile, further reinforces Spencer's argument, providing a tabulation of one of Hume's readerships in particular: those who subscribed to the first American edition of the History, Robert Campbell's Philadelphia edition, published in six volumes in 1795 and 1796. The individuals studied here were plainly significant figures in late eighteenth-century American society, including a bevy of leading Pennsylvania merchants, lawyers, doctors and teachers, but also many keen readers from beyond the Alleghenies and others from as far north as Boston. Intriguingly, they were also a mixed bunch, politically speaking: some conservatives and Federalists paid handsomely to get their hands on Hume, but it is evident that many others had impeccable revolutionary credentials and were ardent Jeffersonians.

Whatever else this rich body of new evidence reveals, it certainly despatches H.F. May's often-quoted assertion—about as far as serious understanding of this...