Correspondence

To the Editor:

I expected vigorous reviews for Americans: A Collision of Histories. Forrest McDonald’s, however, is scurrilous. His strategy is clever. He does not deny the validity of the project or dismiss my attempt at an integrated history of red, white and black people as “politically correct” (which one lay reviewer has done). Instead, he professes admiration for what I conceived, and trashes the book on the basis of what he claims are numerous errors. I will readily admit that McDonald catches me on a typo (Alston/Allston), a misattribution (Walker Percy for Walker Evans), a transposition of names (Oliver Phelps/Nathaniel Gorham, Nathaniel Phelps/Oliver Gorham), and a bad miscalculation (the ratio of reservation Indians to Whites). Nobody is to blame for those and any other errors but me. They need to be corrected.

On the points that would really count if they were to discredit my book, though, McDonald does not succeed in making his case. A rebuttal cannot command the length McDonald had for his review. So let me take one instance for close analysis of how he gets it wrong and then consider what seems to be willful misreading on his part..

My case for close analysis is colonial-era trade, for which McDonald castigates me up and down. According to McDonald, I describe a triangular trade by 1700 that never happened “if only because the slave trade in the British Empire was a monopoly of the Royal Africa company created by Charles II.” My choice of that date clearly refers to the point by which New England had obtained a major share (“much”) of the cod fishery. My argument was that the fisheries made possible a variety of trading ventures, including the African trade, all of which colonials exploited fully. The RAC’s monopoly was ended in 1698. Even before then, “interlopers” from both British and American ports were trading African slaves in large numbers. After the monopoly’s end North American merchants became strongly involved in the slave trade to the Caribbean and especially to the mainland, on the terms I sketched. These points are borne out by what still remains the standard account, Philip D. Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), and in works by Virginia B. Platt, James G. Lydon, Elaine Forman Crane, and Marcus Rediker. They are confirmed by the most recent synthesis, Joseph C. Miller’s “The Slave Trade,” Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (ed. Jacob Ernest Cooke et al., 3 vols., 1993). I wanted to avoid such laborious citation; if I had tried to provide it, I would have written a very lengthy book. On almost all the points McDonald makes, I can provide support at that level if need be. To continue it here would take many pages.

McDonald attacks me in another way. Americans is unashamedly broad-brush interpretive, not monographic. Many points which he calls “slightly muddled” are either necessary for narrative force (banks that represented a new economic factor and mentality, but that did not finance industrial development; the Erie Canal as a marvelous instance of obtaining foreign investment without becoming subject to it), or else are legitimate interpretation. Take just one, which seems to drive McDonald to apoplexy, my characterization of the Constitution as a “map of the future,” balanced against its “explicit” protection of slavery.

Of course it wasn’t a map in literal terms. My use of the phrase was metaphorical, referring with some admiration to the framers’ vision of a common market on an unprecedented scale. The contrast with the hodge-podge of customs and confusion that characterized colonial-era society is a breathtaking mark of the framers’ creativity. Britain already had created something similar, but within a much smaller area. Europe is still wrestling with the problem. The idea of a single, coherent, enforceable law that is flexible yet applicable to all Americans seems to me to underpin much of the best of what we have achieved, not just in terms of economics but in terms of the historical expansion of the notion of American freedom.

Of all the variant, localistic situations that had characterized colonial society, only...