Tangled Vines

...It is, for one thing, ideological history, like the books the Victorians wrote, or the books that are written today in socialist countries...

...His biographical sketches come alive...

...Some Americans," he writes there, "felt that the pursuit of liberty ultimately would safeguard other values, such as order and equality: others saw order and authority as prior goals in protecting liberty...

...It is best described as history in the Nineteenth Century manner written by a Twentieth Century man...

...Godfrey Hodgson (Godfrey Hodgson is a British correspondent who has covered Washington and the United States for many years...

...they still do...

...Nigger," one old woman remembered the Yankee soldier saying to her when she was a little girl a long lifetime earlier, "you're as free as I am...

...He understands that liberty was a goal, not only for cool planter-politicians and merchant-lawyers, but also for angry, disinherited men like the regulators of Shays's Rebellion...

...and the yardstick for the past was always the present...

...It is essentially narrative history, broken up, as Thomas Macaulay or George Bancroft broke up their narratives, with set pieces...

...Nor is there much sign of that liberating movement that has led historians to borrow from other disciplines—from economics, anthropology, and the other social sciences...

...It is a vast canvas, and Burns has filled it with a vitality not altogether unworthy of the sheer raw energy that overflowed from the farms and plantations and counting houses of the East to conquer and people and organize a wilderness of continental extent...

...The Twentieth Century has too efficiently taught the lesson that there are precedents for the narrowing of liberty, too, and that optimism can be a fool's paradise...

...Burns is too intelligent to fall into the cruder absurdities of the teleological school, and too compassionate to imagine that all has been for the best in the best of all possible Americas...

...We do, however, possess firsthand evidence of the actual moment of emancipation in 1863...

...And she remembered her own reply: "Yes, massa...

...Emerson's individualism could be defined as an enriching self-fulfillment or as the liberty to climb over the backs of others to embrace the bitch-goddess success...

...Perhaps I am taking Burns's use of the liberty theme more seriously than he intended...

...What is lacking, in short, is a serious, sustained analysis of the "central, perplexing issues" of a word that meant all things to all Americans and was deified by John C. Calhoun and John Brown alike...

...They had a story to tell...

...perhaps it is meant to be no more than a literary device to organize a long and ambitious narrative...

...All the memorable scenes, all the unforgettable lines are here...

...Nineteenth Century historians rarely escaped from the narrative mode, and from a teleological way of looking at the past...

...These are literary vignettes...

...Many of these are exceedingly well done...

...Liberty, we now understand, is like the law that, in Anatole France's mordant epigram, graciously permits rich and poor alike to sleep rough...

...It is refreshingly innocent of the successive fads and fashions of modern professional historiography...

...The result is curious...

...James McGregor Burns is not a historian by training, but a political scientist turned biographer...

...In support of that interpretation it has to be said that nowhere in The Vineyard of Liberty is there any sustained analysis of what liberty meant to Nineteenth Century Americans, of the ambiguities of the concept, or of its evolution...

...Burns has the reflexes of a Twentieth Century liberal, yet he has written a strangely old-fashioned book...

...There were no tape recorders and no oral historians to ride the circuits of the back country and preserve in their own words how the unlettered Americans of the revolutionary generation felt about the achievement of liberty...

...At its best, The Vineyard of Liberty is a lot better than that...

...The very structure of the book, with its five sections, each with the word "liberty" in its title, acknowledges the contradictions evoked by that word in Nineteenth Century America...

...At its worst, The Vineyard of Liberty sometimes has a flavor of that Hollywood costume drama where, however well the makeup and wardrobe departments have done their research, the actors are so unmistakably contemporary that you know they are going to have a Coke and a cigarette the moment they can struggle out of their flowered silk waistcoats and get the powder out of their hair...

...the story of how we came to be as we are...

...Even the Victorians could have seen, if they had chosen to, that liberty was not having things all its own way in Ireland or Poland or India...

...Some of it was published by B.A...

...Slaves who were children at the time never forgot the poignant moment when the fieldhands saw the long file of horsemen in blue uniforms riding through the cotton, and straightened their backs from the rows...

...Especially enjoyable, because they are less familiar than the portraits of the Founding Fathers and the political leaders of the succeeding generations, are Burns's "Lives of the Engineers," in imitation of Samuel Smiles: capsule biographies of Eli Whitney of the cotton gin, Francis Cabot Lowell, the pioneer New England mill owner, Robert Fulton of the steamship, and Elkanah Watson of the Erie Canal...

...Bot-kin in a collection called Lay My Burden Down...

...Now he has taken as his theme the ambiguities and the disappointments, as well as the triumphs, of the American pursuit of the ideal of liberty from the eve of the Constitutional Convention to the Emancipation Proclamation...

...It is full of color and drama, driven along with pace and energy, and Burns has a gift for phrase when he restrains a tendency to lapse into a purple passage...

...Indeed, there is an uncomfortable parallel between the idea of writing the history of the United States in terms of the abstraction, Liberty, and those Marxist historians who write history in terms of the coming of Socialism or the Revolution...

...Preston Brooks canes Sumner with the familiar degree of savagery, and the first shell "arched in a fiery red parabola" toward Fort Sumter just as we expected it to do...

...Sixty years after the Revolution, and after those other "revolutions" proclaimed by the historians and attached to the names of Jefferson and Jackson, Burns insists that the great majority of Americans were women, blacks, Indians, immigrants, and the rural poor: all of them economically, politically, socially, and to a great extent legally powerless, which is to say unfree...

...He can see the philosophical contradiction that was so brutally exposed in the previous century by Samuel Johnson: "How is it that we heard the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes...

...Early in the book, it is true, there is a passage in which Burns shows that he is aware of these ambiguities...

...There is no suggestion here of the ability to weave together evidence from many different sources that gave authority to such different historians as Marc Bloch and Lewis Na-mier, Fernand Braudel and Eugene D. Genovese...

...To the great Victorian optimists like Bishop William Stubbs, history was the story of liberty "broadening down from precedent to precedent...

...He has written lives of Franklin D. Roosevelt and of both John F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy...

...He is, for example, acutely aware of the contradictions between the ideal of liberty, and the reality of inequality, poverty, and slavery...

...Nor does he imagine that the Emancipation Proclamation resolved that contradiction, though his treatment of why Lincoln signed it and what it meant is so perfunctory that I wondered whether a second volume is planned that will deal more adequately with the great national crisis of the 1860s...

...Above all, Burns has not absorbed what has been a cardinal imperative with most schools of modern historiography: that the present must not be a platform from which privileged observers can survey the past...

...This is a book which, while it may not engage the serious attention of professional historians, will certainly be read by a large number of general readers with great enjoyment...

...But it will give a lot of pleasure, and it will sell a lot of copies...

...They did indeed...

...One section, entitled "The Empire of Liberty," contains a chapter that deals in succession with the deportation of the Five Civilized Nations, the outbreak of aggressive jingoism later called "Manifest Destiny," and the invasion of Mexico...

...They saw it, that is, as flowing purposefully towards a great telos, or End: ourselves...

...Indeed it could, and was...

...It has always been easier to proclaim liberty than to make its promise good in the reality of people's lives...

...The Vineyard of Liberty is old-fashioned history in another sense...

...His book will not greatly add to our understanding of that great process...

...No one outside the United States has written history like that since 1914...

...Thomas Jefferson hears a firebell in the night, and John Brown makes the gallows as "glorious as the cross...

...It is not enough, experience has shown us in this century, to proclaim liberty to those who are prisoners of caste and class, of economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and sexual domination...

...Again, almost 500 pages later, Burns sets down a brief judgment that "on the central, perplexing issues of liberty," the New England transcendentalists left "a legacy of intellectual leadership that was as ambiguous in content as it was evocative in tone...

...Burns vividly evokes, for example, the streets of New York in 1790, or the intellectual atmosphere of Federalist New England, or the temper of South Carolina on the eve of secession...

...It is popular history in the grand manner, and at its best not far below the achievements of such masters of that respectable genre as Sir Arthur Bryant or Bruce Catton...

...He wrote "America in Our Time" and "All Things to All Men...