The Jefferson Lecture

Bailyn presented a view of the "pastoral republic," a place later imagined by such painters as Thomas Cole: an idyllic scene in the sea of corruption populated by flawed but virtuous and honest citizens who earnestly sought to make a better arrangement for governing. It was an America that was considerably different from the urbane European world from which it came, and equally so from the industrial nation that it would become.

The key to understanding the accomplishment of the founders is the idea of promise. "They were warned of the folly of defying the received traditions, the sheer unlikelihood that they, obscure people on the outer borderlands of European civilization, knew better than the established authorities...that they could create something freer, ultimately more enduring than what was then known in the centers of metropolitan life," said Bailyn. Yet they clung to the idea of promise, the promise to create a new and better arrangement for mankind, better than anything that went before for more people. The pursuit of happiness was a radical notion in the eighteenth century.

And they succeeded, against all odds and against all the best received opinion of the day. The founders' success was due, in large part, argued Bailyn, to the fact that they were provincials: "alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it-comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations." They perceived that their very remoteness from the metropolitan world gave them a moral advantage in politics. And believing that freedom depends, to some degree, on the virtue of rulers and the ruled alike, America-"in the provincial simplicity of its manners, its lack of luxury and pomp, its artlessness, homeliness, lack of affectation and cynicism"-had taken Britain's place as the "guardian and promoter of liberty." Their provincialism nourished their political imaginations; it gave them the ability to view the world with a cool, critical, and challenging eye. They refused to be intimidated and were confident of their integrity and creative capacities. They "demanded to know why things must be the way they are; and they had the imagination, energy, and moral stature to conceive of something closer to the grain of everyday reality and more likely to lead to human happiness," added Bailyn.

Bailyn concluded the 1998 Jefferson Lecture by observing that though we do not have the need or the opportunity to begin the world anew, we do have the obligation, as the inheritors of the successes of the founders, to view every establishment critically, to remain in some sense on the margins, and to continue to ask why things must be the way they are.

For forty-five years Bailyn taught history to Harvard students, fascinating them with the heady experience of learning history that is never a science, always a craft, and sometimes an art. His style is to demand that the student puzzle things out for himself. His classes are predictably brilliant in their wide-ranging and free-flowing landscapes where interpretive historical vistas are sketched rapidly with exhilarating intellectual connections.

Twice the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in history, Bailyn's 1968 book, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, transformed the writing of American history and challenged long-standing interpretations about the causes of the American Revolution. Other historians, in opposition to the economic interpretations of the Revolution and the drive for independence, had made the point that the American revolutionaries in 1776 were men of deep principle. Bailyn went further and argued that because the colonists absorbed from English sources a hard-edged, suspicious view of politics and the world of power, they were predisposed to regard British initiatives as attempts to turn virtuous Americans into political slaves. Besides winning a Pulitzer, the book also won the George Bancroft Prize. Still another, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, won the National Book Award. Hutchinson, observed Bailyn, was an able administrator, adept at the intricacies of political game playing with the British parliament, but out of touch with colonial sentiment in his own backyard.

The Peopling of British North America and Voyagers to the West developed out of Bailyn's interest in the distance and suspicion that grew between American colonists and their British colonial rulers. In these books, he examines how the lives of those who came to America before the Revolution were forever bound with the new nation's fortunes. Meticulous acts of scholarship, both books are compelling history about the independence and self-sufficiency these voyagers were seeking.

Former president of the American Historical Association, Bailyn was elected in 1994 to the Russian Academy of Sciences, the first American historian to be elected to that body since George Bancroft in 1867. He is director of the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World. Bailyn did his undergraduate study at Williams College. He earned his master's and doctorate degrees from Harvard. Since 1953 he has been teaching colonial history and the American Revolution at Harvard, where he is Adams University Professor Emeritus. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1922. Lotte Bailyn, his wife, is T. Wilson Professor of Management at Sloan School of Management, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor the federal government bestows for achievement in the humanities. It was established in 1972, and carries a $10,000 stipend.