The party of no

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written a sprightly review of the historian Edmund Morgan’s new book of essays, American Heroes. Included are a reexamination of witches in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, which credits the Puritans for ending the trials after twenty executions and then seeking atonement, and an appreciation of Perry Miller. Morgan begins by quoting Benjamin Franklin’s ironic description of the hero who, “when he comes, takes life and goods together; his business and glory it is, to destroy man and the works of man.” Morgan’s heroes, though, are those who “knew when to say no, just as they knew when inaction was preferable to action.”

On Stephens’s account of it, American Heroes is a reminder that historians too may write a “spiritual autobiography” in relationship to texts.