Edward Morris

The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it’s John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle. “This has been true of everything I’ve written,” the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner tells BookPage from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. “I try to write a book so that if they could read it, they would say, yes, he got it.”

McCullough’s ghostly audience this time around would include the American rebels, British regulars and their leaders who clashed with each other during the second year of the Revolutionary War. The book is titled simply 1776. It begins with the siege of Boston, an American triumph; continues through the struggles for New York in which the British forces prevailed; and ends with the American resurgence in the wintry frays at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey.

McCullough chose to focus on 1776 “because that was the low point of our fortunes, not just in the war, but, I think one can say, in the whole history of the country. The prospects of there even being a United States of America were never more bleak. Also, it was the year of the Declaration of Independence. When I was writing the John Adams biography and trying to understand everything that was going on in Philadelphia that summer of 1776, I realized, perhaps more than I had before, that all they were doing there was theoretical and that the Declaration itself would have been nothing but words on paper had it not been for the people out fighting the war. Everything depended on them.”

While much of McCullough’s account is involved in showing how the reluctant George Washington developed into an effective military leader, it is just as attentive to the importance of lower-ranking officers and foot soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

“I think too little has been written about the British in the Revolutionary War,” he says. “A lot of what happened with those in the British army and those who were trying to manage the war in London has not been fairly understood.” To understand it better, McCullough traveled to London and pored through such primary sources of the period as letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines.

“I tried to soak up [the British magazines] if only for the vocabulary,” he says. “I [didn’t] want to be influenced by what other historians are writing now. I respect what they’re doing, and I read much of it. But I’m finding my way into that other time and into the lives of those other people through material that came from that other time and from those other people.”

McCullough was determined to give the much-maligned King George III his due. The monarch’s initial response to the American rebellion, he shows, was measured, cautious and hopeful for a peaceful resolution. Moreover, the king was a man of considerable taste and talent. “I went to see an exhibit of [his] collection of art,” says McCullough, “which included his own paintings, which are wonderful. I had simply read that he was interested in art, but when you see what he actually did himself mostly architectural drawings they’re superb.” The fact that Britain lost the war and that the king went insane many years later, McCullough thinks, helped to make George such an object of derision.

Equally diligent in researching American particulars, McCullough says he followed the path of the rebel army from Boston all the way south. “That’s also the fun of the work,” he observes. “Very often I will write the chapter, at least the first draft, before I go to look at [the actual scene] to see how closely I’ve come to getting it right. And always always there are certain things that are different from what I thought. For example, Fort Washington, which is a big part of the story. When you say it’s up above the Hudson River it is, but when you go there, it is really up above the Hudson River. You understand why [the Americans] thought it was impregnable. I felt it. I don’t think you can know anything unless you feel it. I thought, My god! If I had a fort up here, I would know damn well it could hold out. Nobody could come up those cliffs. Of course, they did.”

Tales of American courage and fortitude abound in 1776, but McCullough also presents the rebel army’s deficiencies. “Obviously, there were a lot of people who just couldn’t take it and [who] thought it was hopeless and more than anybody should be asked to do. And so they deserted by the thousands or, when their enlistment was up, they went home by the thousands. They all weren’t heroes by any means.” In addition, he points out, thousands of colonials remained loyal to the crown: “It wasn’t just a theoretic displeasure with the Revolution. They were really against it and willing to fight against it.”

Calling it the most important war in our history, McCullough says he thinks Americans tend to overlook the Revolution for one simple reason: there are no photographs of it. “We see photographs of the people in the Civil War and photographs of the carnage at Antietam and Gettysburg in Matthew Brady’s photographs. We can identify with that. Those are real people. But the people of the Revolution are so often pictured in our minds because of paintings we’ve seen as characters in a costume pageant. There’s something not quite fully real about them. And the other thing people think is that the loss of life was relatively small. Well, by 20th-century terms, of course, it was very small. But in proportion to the size of population at the time, it was enormous. If we lost a comparable number of Americans in a war today as we lost in the Revolution, we would lose about three million people.”

McCullough says it took him about four years to research and write 1776. At the moment, he has no other books in the works. “I’m trying to calm myself,” he says with a chuckle.

Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.

Doris Kearns Goodwin pinpoints Lincoln's political genius Vigorous research has a way of toppling a scholar's most reasonable expectations. When Doris Kearns Goodwin decided more than 10 years ago that her next book would be about Abraham Lincoln, she assumed it would roughly parallel the approach and structure of No Ordinary Time, her Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt confronting World War II.

But as Goodwin delved into the wealth of primary sources, she became convinced that the story she really needed to tell was that of Lincoln's close and productive relationship with his three rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of 1860. At Lincoln's insistence, these men William H. Seward of New York, Salmon Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri all became key members of his cabinet and went on to serve him well throughout the bloodiest years of the Civil War. He appointed yet another former adversary, Edwin Stanton, as his secretary of war. In recognizing, recruiting and relying on talent, Lincoln held no grudges.

Speaking to BookPage from her home in Concord, Massachusetts, about her new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Goodwin says her awareness of Lincoln's political talents emerged slowly. "I thought at first that I might focus on Abraham Lincoln and [his wife] Mary, just as I had done with Franklin and Eleanor. You tend to get a certain comfort from knowing what you've done before. But then, [during] those early months and months of reading, I realized that [Lincoln] was spending even more time with these colleagues in the cabinet . . . than he was with Mary. And he was sharing emotions with them. Unlike with Franklin and Eleanor, where Eleanor was a central figure in the [World War II] home front, the story of Mary would be important, but it would be a private story." Apart from Mary Lincoln, Goodwin also casts her attentive eye on several other forceful and fascinating women within the Lincoln milieu, notably Seward's politically radical wife, Frances, and Chase's beautiful and socially astute daughter, Kate. The author's depictions of the Washington social scene are photographic in both detail and dramatic impact.

Goodwin admits that she knew relatively little about the 19th century when she began her work. "All the other history that I've done has been in the 20th century. I wondered, will I be able to feel what it was like to live on a daily basis in an earlier time? Unlike the book on Roosevelt, where I was able to interview people, and certainly [the one on] Lyndon Johnson [Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream], where I knew him, I knew I wouldn't be talking to anybody [from that era]." Instead, she relied on primary source material. "They wrote so many letters and kept those extraordinary diaries. I could feel them living day by day, even more intimately than I understood Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt." Virtually perching on Lincoln's shoulder as he navigates through incompetent generals, battlefield setbacks and warring factions within his own administration, Goodwin portrays him as a master manipulator although never for petty or destructive causes. She illustrates how he led his cabinet, the military and the country with a light and sensitive rein, even as he endured a succession of personal crises. Oddly enough, the theater, where he would meet his death, became a principal source of solace in his final years.

In Goodwin's estimation, Lincoln has had no political equal. "Roosevelt understood timing, as Lincoln did. He had a feeling for the country as a whole, I think, so that he knew when to get Americans involved in [World War II], even before Pearl Harbor. And that's similar to Lincoln's understanding of timing with when to do the Emancipation Proclamation and when to bring black soldiers in." But, Goodwin points out, it was Lincoln's "decency and morality" and his ability to turn these virtues into political instruments that ultimately set him above other leaders. "My husband [Richard Goodwin] worked in the Kennedy administration," she says. "He remembers this great dinner one night with the great British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. . . . Anyway, they were having a discussion about whether you could be great and good at the same time, and the only people they came up with were Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln." Integrating the personalities of Seward, Chase, Bates and Stanton into the Lincoln chronicle was especially time-consuming, Goodwin observes. "I think the reason that it took so long was that it was like doing a biography on each one of them. It's the only way you could get the best stuff. You could have done this book, I suppose, by just reading secondary sources on the guys and then doing all the original research on Lincoln. But [you had to do more] in order to get the best stories and to emotionally connect with all these other people. . . . I had to have these huge chronologies of each one, and I would actually put them on a wall so I could see where they overlapped." In 2002, a number of critics accused Goodwin of plagiarism or, at minimum, insufficient documentation, particularly in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. "The main thing about this book [on Lincoln]," Goodwin offers, when asked about the controversy, "was that I was able in this whole research really from the beginning to have everything on a computer, which made all the difference. It meant that all the notes that were taken on books could be scanned into the computer, not handwritten, and all the footnotes could be inserted simultaneously, instead of doing it after the chapter was done. So I had, all along as I was doing this, absolute confidence that there would be no [documentation] problem." The problem Goodwin faces now is withdrawing from Lincoln's world without having another project to fall back on. "I miss it already," she laments. "It's weird, because especially in the last couple of years there was such pressure to finish it. You knew how to focus your day. It feels strange now, not having that. I wake up and I feel sort of scattered." Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

America’s Founding Fathers tackled many thorny questions from the pursuit of happiness to the separation of powers but they never had to confront such controversial issues as stem cell research, Social Security or campaign finance reform. With the Founders held in high esteem, and modern politicians viewed with considerable contempt, it’s not surprising that many Americans wonder how the men who formed our nation’s government might handle today’s most difficult problems.

Journalist and historian Richard Brookhiser offers a witty and thought-provoking response in What Would the Founders Do? Their Questions, Our Answers. Plumbing the Founders’ recorded musings, Brookhiser speculates on such matters as how Alexander Hamilton would react to Hurricane Katrina (he would expect city, state and federal executives to demonstrate energy in their response) and what Thomas Jefferson might think of assisted suicide (he would support it). It quickly becomes apparent that Brookhiser, while respectful of the Founders, is no sacred textualist. He is clearly more interested in spotlighting provocative ideas than he is in presenting correct ones.

Speaking from his home in New York, Brookhiser says his inspiration for the book came from people asking him WWFD questions every time he spoke about the Founders. When he told his wife that one of his lectures on Alexander Hamilton, his historical specialty, had sparked four such inquiries, she suggested that they should be the subject of his next book. (His earlier books include Rules of Civility, Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton and The Adamses.) I tried to find as realistic answers as I could, he explains. I think the only time I’m close to being totally tongue-in-cheek is [with] the one on campaign finance reform where I say it’s a wonder that James Madison and Gouverneur Morris ever got elected to anything. I’ve been a political journalist for almost 30 years for National Review, Brookhiser explains. The way I generated the questions [was that] I just thought, What am I writing about with my National Review hat on? All the editorials that I and my colleagues write, what are they all about? . . . So I said, OK, pitch all these balls to the Founders and see how they swing at them. It was like writing 60 articles. Brookhiser rejects the notion that the Founders were all over the map philosophically and thus unlikely to be of a single mind about anything. I would say that were often all over the map politically, but I wouldn’t say [they were] philosophically. There were certain core principles that they all agreed on. It’s very interesting that the Continental Congress made lots of changes in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration [of Independence]. But they did not touch what we regard as the most famous parts of it the opening. Hardly anything was done to that. People look to the Founders for guidance, Brookhiser thinks, because America is still a young country. They’re not that far away, he says. They’re closer than Charlemagne. And yet we have old institutions. The presidency goes back to 1789; Congress goes back to 1774. You compare that to five French republics and two empires and two kingdoms, and we have lots of continuity. Maybe the most important thing is that the Founders were politicians, and they were recognizably like modern politicians. They had to run for office. They had to say what they thought. They debated with each other. Another strand of relevance, Brookhiser notes, was that the Founders were future-oriented. They were very mindful of working for posterity and of the world watching them as examples. This was a little country, on the edge of things. But when they’re at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry said, If we fail, we will disappoint the world.’ In an appendix, Brookhiser has some fun with the Founders when he imagines them as modern-day bloggers. The industrious Ben Franklin has three blogs Dirtyoldman, Keytech and YouSucceed to present his sides as a sensualist, scientist and self-help guru. Sam Adams blogs under BeerandLiberty. If these guys were alive now, he says, of course they’d be blogging. . . . The Patriot Act forbids me from telling you how I’m in contact with the Founders, but be assured that I am. If the author can fathom what the Founders would think about intelligent design, then it seems fair to ask him how they’d view this book about them. I think none of them would quarrel with [me] trying to do it in a popular way, he says. Almost all of them wrote journalism. Franklin would like it to the extent that it’s humorous and pulling people’s legs. In terms of what I’m saying about their thoughts, I’m sure I’d get a lot of quarrels because I’m bluntly presenting quarrels that they had. Jefferson would say, Why are you presenting Hamilton’s argument so well? I mean, really, come on!‘ And vice versa. So I’m sure I’d get a lot of that. In a way, I’m glad they’re dead. I’m sure I’d be fielding a lot of correspondence. Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.