After the Revolution by Joseph J. Ellis

Author:Joseph J. Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

* Psychohistory suffers from one crucial deficiency—we are not able to resurrect the subject and ask him or her the questions that must be answered in order to fill the inevitable gaps in the evidence. Historians share the problem with psychohistorians, but since the latter frequently claim to be offering scientific conclusions, the absence of evidence is more damaging to their cause. In Dunlap’s case, only a clinical hypothesis based on the striking but scanty evidence that survives is possible, namely, that Dunlap feared rejection by his father and developed what Freudians would describe as a repressed oedipal complex.13

* Dunlap’s release of the slaves owned by his father is the kind of act that offers a splendid opportunity to indulge in psychological speculation (i.e., the son, at last freed from his father, also liberates the other members of the household). But the relationship between Dunlap’s attitude toward parental authority and his abolitionism, while suggestive, is by no means clear. Although it is plausible that he was predisposed to endorse emancipation because of his own emotional background, it is also true that his thinking about slavery was greatly influenced by the reading he did in the 1790s and the opinions of his intellectual friends.49

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