The Lamp of Experience

Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition: 1943 and All That

LAMP_i-xxvi.indd 11 5/27/11 1:09 PM Priface to the Liberty Fund Edition: 1943 and All That Much has happened in the more than thirty years that have passed since The Lamp if Experience was first published by the Institute of Early American History in 1965. Many who helped shape that volume have passed on-notably, Douglass Adair (to whom The Lamp of Experience was properly dedicated), Lyman Butterfield, Julian Boyd, Dumas Malone, Millicent Sowerby, Edwin Wolf II, and John H. Powell. It is a depressingly long list. But this new edition allows for the confirmation of earlier acknowledgments and obligations and also permits some brief reflections on the strange history of a book about history. Born in Australia (his parents were there at the time), the author was educated in England (European diplomatic history with the late William Medlicott) and secured his graduate degrees in Williamsburg and Baltimore. In Williamsburg, at the College of William and Mary, a young assistant professor named Adair introduced a much younger exchange student named Colbourn to ThomasJefferson and took seeming delight in asking questions only the questioner could answer. Certainly migration to Baltimore was not an immediate solution: Colbourn's arrival at The Johns Hopkins University in 1949 coincided with his discovery that the Hopkins colonialist, Charles Barker, had decided to abandon his study of the American Revolution for Henry George (1955), also a conservative revolutionary to be sure. But the late Charles Barker was a generous spirit who readily agreed to the creation of a very informal advisory committee for his errant graduate student, which soon included Douglass Adair, Dumas Xl LAMP_i-xxvi.indd 12 5/27/11 1:09 PM PREFACE TO THE LIBERTY FUND EDITION Malone, Lyman Butterfield, and Adair's very scholarly friend, Caroline Robbins. All were generous with their time and all knew Jefferson rather well. The outcome, spurred by the incentive of reemployment at Penn State in 1953, was a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Jefferson's use of history. In turn this dissertation generated a paper given at the American Historical Association convention in 1955, which in turn led to an article in the 1958 William and Mary Quarterly. What next? Lyman Butterfield thought the author's approach to Jefferson had promise but needed substantial expansion. And so the subject of Thomas Jefferson provided the material for chapter 8 and the seed for the further inquiry that became The Lamp of Experience. Such growth owed much to the encouragement provided by Caroline Robbins, who allowed the author a summer in her extraordinary private library. Shelf after shelf of the writings of her seventeenthand eighteenth-century "Commonwealthmen" illustrated the relevance ofEngland's Real Whigs for the leaders ofthe American Revolution . Frequent visits to the Library of Congress's Rare Book Room and a year combing the shelves of the Library Company of Philadelphia reinforced that message. Thus far the emergence of The Lamp of Experience was far from unusual except for the time taken by its author in writing it. Perhaps his colleagues were too patient. Certainly there were other studies under way and other books already published that advanced the understanding of the intellectual origins of the American Revolution . Some books seem to await the appearance ofother books before they take shape.This is particularly true for o'ur understanding of the era ofthe Revolution, for which 1943 emerges as a seminal historiographical turning point. In the midst of World War II the United States had good reason to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of ThomasJefferson and laid plans for the publication ofall the available papers ofthat great spokesman for democracy. Begun byJulian Boyd and Lyman Butterfield, this ambitious project has outlived both men. Butterfield, to be sure, deserted Jefferson for the Adams family and xu LAMP_i-xxvi.indd 13 5/27/11 1:09 PM Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition editing on a less comprehensive scale. He did, however, live to complete his Diary and Autobiography ofjohn Adams (1961) and his Adams Family Correspondence (1963) and to see similar projects emerge as a tribute to most of the Founding Fathers.1 Plans were also laid for a unique catalog ofthe magnificent private library Jefferson sold to the Congress in 1815. In charge of this noble enterprise was a battle-axe of an Englishwoman, Millicent Sowerby, who, like her one-time colleague, Ed Wolf, was a rare-book specialist . Wolf...