Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History, Vol. I, The Colonial Period to Reconstruction, 11th

This debate-style reader is designed to introduce students to controversies in American history through readings that reflect a variety of viewpoints. Each issue is framed with an issue summary, an issue introduction, and a postscript. Taking Sides is supported by our student Web site, Dushkin Online (www.dushkin.com/online/).

PART 1. Colonial Society

ISSUE 1. Is History True?

YES: Oscar Handlin, from Truth in History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979)

NO: William H. McNeill, from “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” The American Historical Review 91 (February 1986)

Oscar Handlin insists that historical truth is absolute and knowable by historians who adopt the scientific method of research to discover factual evidence that provides both a chronology and context for their findings. William McNeill argues that historical truth is general and evolutionary and is discerned by different groups at different times and in different places in a subjective manner that has little to do with a scientifically absolute methodology.

ISSUE 2. Was Columbus an Imperialist?

YES: Kirkpatrick Sale, from The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

NO: Robert Royal, from 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992)

Kirkpatrick Sale, a contributing editor of The Nation, characterizes Christopher Columbus as an imperialist who was determined to conquer both the land and the people he encountered during his first voyage to the Americas in 1492. Robert Royal, vice president for research at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, objects to Columbus’s modern-day critics and insists that Columbus should be admired for his courage, his willingness to take a risk, and his success in advancing knowledge about other parts of the world.

ISSUE 3. Were the First Colonists in the Chesapeake Region Ignorant, Lazy, and Unambitious?

YES: Edmund S. Morgan, from American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (W.W. Norton, 1975)

NO: Russell R. Menard, from “From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 30 (January 1973)

Professor Edmund S. Morgan argues that Virginia’s first decade as a colony was a complete "fiasco" because the settlers were too lazy to engage in the subsistence farming necessary for their survival and failed to abandon their own and the Virginia’s company’s expectations of establishing extractive industries such as mining, timber, and fishing. According to Professor Russell R. Menard, the indentured servants of seventeenth-century Maryland were hardworking, energetic, and young individuals who went through two stages of history: From 1640 to 1660 servants provided large planters with an inexpensive labor force, but they also achieved greater wealth and mobility in the Chesapeake than if they remained in England; after 1660 opportunities for servants to achieve land, wealth, and status drastically declined.

ISSUE 4. Did Colonial New England Women Enjoy Significant Economic Automomy?

YES: Gloria L. Main, from “Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 51 (January 1994)

NO: Lyle Koehler, from A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Illinois Press, 1980)

Gloria Main notes that New England women were highly valued for their labor and relative scarcity in the early colonial period and that their economic autonomy increased in the years during and following the Seven Years War as more women entered the paid labor force and received higher wages for their work. Lyle Koehler contends that Puritan attitudes toward rights of inheritance, as well as the division of labor that separated work into male and female spheres, discouraged productive, independent activity on the part of New England women.

ISSUE 5. Was There a Great Awakening in Mid-Eighteenth-Century America?

YES: Patricia U. Bonomi, from Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial Amerca (Oxford University Press, 1986)

NO: Jon Butler, from “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” Journal of American History 69 (September 1982)

Patricia Bonomi defines the Great Awakening as a period of intense revivalistic fervor from 1739 to 1745 that laid the foundation for socio-religious and political reform by spawning an age of contentiousness in the British mainland colonies. Jon Butler claims that to describe the religious revival activities of the eighteenth century as the "Great Awakening" is to seriously exaggerate their extent, nature, and impact on pre-revolutionary American society and politics.

PART 2. Revolution and the New Nation

ISSUE 6. Was the American Revolution a Conservative Movement?

YES: Carl N. Degler, from Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America rev. ed. (Harper and Row, 1970)

NO: Gordon S. Wood, from The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl N. Degler aruges that upper-middle-class colonists led a conservative American Revolution that left untouched the prewar economic and social class structure of an upwardly mobile people. Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood argues that the American Revolution was a far-reaching, radical event that produced a unique democratic society in which ordinary people could make money, pursue happiness, and be self-governing.

ISSUE 7. Were the Founding Fathers Democratic Reformers?

YES: John P. Roche, from “The Founding Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action,” American Political Science Review (December 1961)

NO: Alfred F. Young, from “The Framers of the Constitution and the ‘Genius’ of the People,” Radical History Review (vol. 42, 1988)

Political scientist John P. Roche asserts that the Founding Fathers were not only revolutionaries but also superb democratic politicians who created a Constitution that supported the needs of the nation and at the same time was acceptable to the people. Historian Alfred F. Young argues that the Founding Fathers were an elite group of college-educated lawyers, merchants, slaveholding planters, and “monied men” who strengthened the power of the central government yet, at the same time, were forced to make some democratic accommodations in writing the Constitution in order to ensure its acceptance in the democratically controlled ratifying conventions.

ISSUE 8. Was President Thomas Jefferson a Political Compromiser?

YES: Morton Borden, from America’s Eleven Greatest Presidents (Rand McNally, 1971)

NO: Forrest McDonald, from The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (The University Press of Kansas, 1976)

Professor Morton Borden argues that President Thomas Jefferson was a moderate and pragmatic politician who placed the nation’s best interests above those of the states. History professor Forrest McDonald believes that President Jefferson attempted to replace Hamiltonian Federalist Principles with a Republican ideology in order to restore America’s agrarian heritage.

ISSUE 9. Was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 a Well-Designed Policy to Protect the Latin American Countries from European Intervention?

YES: Dexter Perkins, from The Monroe Doctrine: 1823-1826 (Harvard University Press, 1927)

NO: Ernest R. May, from The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Harvard University Press, 1975)

According to Professor Dexter Perkins President James Monroe issued his famous declaration of December 2, 1823 to protest Russian expansionism in the Pacific Northwest and to prevent European intervention in South America from restoring to Spain her former colonies. According to Professor Ernest R. May domestic political considerations brought about the Monroe Doctrine when the major presidential candidates attempted to gain a political advantage over their rivals during the presidential campaign of 1824.

ISSUE 10. Was Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy Motivated by Humanitarian Impulses?

YES: Robert V. Remini, from Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832, vol. 2 (Harper & Row, 1981)

NO: Anthony F. C. Wallace, from The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (Hill & Wang, 1993)

Historical biographer Robert V. Remini argues that Andrew Jackson did not seek to destroy Native American life and culture. He portrays Jackson as a national leader who sincerely believed that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the only way to protect Native Americans from annihilation at the hands of white settlers. Historian and anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace contends that Andrew Jackson oversaw a harsh policy with regard to Native Americans. This policy resulted in the usurpation of land, attempts to destroy tribal culture, and the forcible removal of Native Americans from the southeastern United States to a designated territory west of the Mississippi River.

PART 3. Antebellum America

ISSUE 11. Did Slavery Destroy the Black Family?

YES: Wilma A. Dunaway, from The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

NO: Eug ene D. Genovese, from Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Random House, 1974)

Professor Wilma A. Dunaway believes that modern historians have exaggerated the amount of control slaves exercised over thei...