Separation Anxiety
Eric Foner
- A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution by Theodore Draper
Little, Brown, 544 pp, £25.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 316 87802 2
The American Revolution is the subject of a rich and complex historical literature. In the 19th century, George Bancroft, the father of American historical writing, portrayed it as the culmination of a long, divinely-inspired progress – the triumph of freedom and democracy on the North American continent. The seed of liberty, planted by the earliest settlers, reached its inevitable flowering in national independence.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 10 · 23 May 1996
From Theodore Draper
Eric Foner’s review of my book, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution was unconscionably biased (LRB, 18 April). Here are three examples of Foner’s methods.
1. Foner: ‘It is certainly odd to encounter a book on the coming of the Revolution in which the words “liberalism” and “republicanism” do not appear in the index and the Country Party ideology is treated in a single paragraph.’
Draper: ‘Liberalism’ was not an 18th-century term and my index contained ‘republican: meaning of’, p.345. In fact, I discussed the colonists’ reluctance to embrace ‘republicanism’ before 1776 at some length.
2. Foner: ‘Americans’ “quest for power” began, he [Draper] writes, “as soon as settlers arrived in New England” in 1620.’
Draper: This is what I wrote: ‘The first premonitions of an American “quest for power” came almost as soon as settlers arrived in New England.’ I then gave examples of ‘gloomy prophets’ – Sir Fernando Gorges in the 1730s and Major John Child in 1647. In effect, Foner transformed the ‘premonitions’ by British authors into a flat statement by me.
3. Foner: ‘As early as 1764, Draper speaks of “the incipient Revolution”, even though no one resisting the Sugar Act in that year had the remotest thought of independence.’
Draper: I made the point that both sides had reasons in 1764 to persuade themselves that they were right. ‘In each case, right coincided with self-interest; the clash of rights was also a clash of interests. Seen this way, the incipient Revolution could be decided only by the capitulation of one side or the other, by some sort of compromise between them, or by a final conflict that would separate them for ever. It took ten years to resolve which one of these choices it was going to be.’ In no sense did I say or suggest that ‘the incipient Revolution’ started as early as 1765 or that those resisting the Sugar Act ‘had the remotest sense of independence’.
I have chosen only three flagrant examples of Foner’s consistent distortion.
I cannot understand why it was necessary to go to New York for a review of my book when there are several fine historians of the American colonial period in Great Britain.
Theodore Draper
Princeton, New Jersey
Eric Foner writes: I have read and reread Theodore Draper’s letter and cannot discover what he is complaining about. In none of the three cases does his rebuttal invalidate my point. In fact, the passages he quotes from the book demonstrate the accuracy of my comments rather than refuting them.
It hardly seems fair for Mr Draper, a frequent contributor to that outpost of Oxbridge in the Big Apple, the New York Review, to object when the London Review engages an American.
