Historical Writing: Documenting the New Nation

Sources

Background. With the close of the American Revolution came an outpouring of histories in the new American nation. The first American writer to produce such a work was Jeremy Belknap, who published the first volume of his History of New-Hampshire in 1784. Belknap’s contemporaries followed suit with histories of their own states, including Samuel Williams’s The Natural and Civil History of Vermont (1794) and Hugh Williamson’s The History of North Carolina (1812). These historians wrote partly out of a natural desire to explain the origins of their new nation. For historians such as Belknap and Williamson, this enterprise was more than a matter of disinterested intellectual inquiry. Recognizing that the bonds uniting their diverse and contentious compatriots were still fragile, they also sought to instill a more secure sense of national identity. Although these historians focused on their individual states, they emphasized the qualities that all Americans shared and made their states embody national traits.

David Ramsay. One of the most prolific and highly regarded of the early national historians was David Ramsay. After training as a doctor in Philadelphia, Ramsay settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where he served the revolutionary cause as a member of the state legislature and later as a delegate to the Continental Congress. After his first historical work, The History of the Revolution of South-Carolina (1785), he wrote a more general history of the Revolution (1789), as well as a biography of George Washington (1807) and a history of South Carolina (1809). For Ramsay these books were important to defining and creating a unified sense of national identity, and he hoped that other Americans would produce histories because, “Enthusiastic as I am for the Unity of our republic I wish for every thing that tends to unite us as one people who know esteem & love each other.”

Republican Consensus. In his books Ramsay tried to further national unity by emphasizing the consensus that had existed among colonial and Revolution-era Americans. In particular he pointed to their shared commitment to republican principles, which dated back to the earliest settlement of the colonies. In his history of the Revolution he concluded: “The English Colonists were from their first settlement in America, devoted to English liberty, on English principles.” Through such a portrayal, he used history to combat the sectional and social divisions threatening to fragment the new republic.

Sources

David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, edited by Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1990);

Arthur H. Shaffer, The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution, 1783–1815 (Chicago: Precedent, 1975);

Shaffer, To Be an American: David Ramsay and the Making of the American Consciousness (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).